25/04/2024 - Maja Prettner’s documentary centres on a female evangelical pastor enduring a crisis of faith that is also an identity crisis

When we are first introduced to Jana, the protagonist from Maja Prettner’s Woman of God, she is delivering a sermon to a substantial crowd, and her confidence is striking. The evangelical pastor clearly has a good rapport with the members of her parish; smiling and shaking hands, she appears utterly comfortable with her work, which in her case is also her life’s mission. Playing at this year’s edition of Hot Docs in a programme called The Changing Face of Europe, the documentary simply follows its protagonist over a period that appears to span over a year, giving her opportunities to talk but not, it seems, ever pushing her to explain herself more than she might like.

It is therefore hard to tell whether Jana’s ensuing self-doubt is at all triggered by the presence of the camera, or if it was fortuitously captured by a crew present in just the right place, at the right time. In any case, it is fascinating to see and hear Jana’s ideas about her own life radically change over time, even as her circumstances do not appear to become all that different to us. Her journey is almost entirely internal, and while Jana’s situation seems unchanged, her reflection concerns not only the present, but also the past.

Coming from a family of ministers, Jana at first seems to beautifully fit into a world she has known her whole life. It’s a position that can seem to the viewer eminently desirable, with Jana also enjoying what looks like a close relationship with her mother. Yet accompanying these images of familial bliss is Jana’s voiceover, which insists more than once on how well-deserved this happiness is, considering all the struggles faced by her and her loved ones in the past. As one may expect from a pastor, Jana presents these past obstacles as valuable experiences that taught her patience, forgiveness and resilience; perhaps because she is good at her job, which does, after all, involve frequent use of rhetoric, we do believe that she has managed to turn them all into ultimately positive opportunities for growth.

However, this only makes the cracks which start to appear in the seemingly well-balanced life of this apparently wise woman all the more shocking and alarming. One of the major problems she faces is the dwindling number of attendees at her church; as the film goes on and Jana grows increasingly unsettled, she opens herself up to the film crew and reveals a long-gestating frustration at how little her superiors have allowed her to try to do in order to reach more believers. At the peak of her disillusionment, she explains that she is tired of always being given the scraps, meaning small parishes in the countryside that other pastors do not want.

She never usually voices her disappointment about this, or anything else – as the film goes on, Jana seems to become increasingly aware of this habit she has of weathering all of her problems alone. At first, however, she appears almost proud of that: in a striking scene of self-disclosure, she casually tells the filmmaker that she was sexually abused by a family friend when she was young, but mentions in the same breath that she very quickly forgave her victimiser. She explains that she moved past her trauma when she realised that the man who harmed her must have been in a lot of pain himself. And once again, being a pastor and apparently incredibly mature, she is very persuasive.

But on this, too, Jana eventually changes her tune. Did she really get over this so quickly, if at all? And what other secret resentments or traumas has she buried over the years, mistakenly believing they would never return to haunt her? Woman of God centres on a pastor enduring a crisis of faith that is also an identity crisis, one we are privy to exclusively through her testimony given to camera. Though it could be perceived as a portrait of someone breaking free from beliefs and (religious) habits that no longer serve them, it is most of all a look at changing definitions of the self, and at how these inner transformations might manifest on the outside.

Woman of God was produced by Studio Virc (Slovenia). Split Screen is in charge of its international sales.