‘In Viaggio’ – Pope Francis’ Long Pilgrimage

“We are a society that has forgotten the experience of weeping.” This is among the first vocal expressions of Pope Francis in the documentary In Viaggio, presented out of competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2022. The documentary film director Gianfranco Rosi chose and constructed this lengthy papal journey, after previously working on films such as Below Sea Level (2008), about a community of homeless people, Sacro GRA (2013) which won a Golden Lion at Venice by capturing the different ways people live out their existence in the shadow of Rome’s ring road, and Fire at Sea (2016), winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival, in which he explores the stories of fishermen and migrants living on the island of Lampedusa.[1]

The film documents Pope Francis’ numerous journeys, with glimpses into some of the 37 apostolic visits  he has made to 59 countries, concluding with the trip to Malta in 2022. Each stage constitutes a piece of a mosaic that aims to show an outgoing Church, capable of touching the wounds and drying the tears generated by poverty, wars, power, exclusion and human and environmental exploitation.

The shot that comes up again and again is the one that shows the Holy Father from behind in the popemobile, moving through  streets, surrounded by  crowds that want  to see him, hear him, touch him. The image conveys  well the message of the movement toward the people, with that hand tirelessly continuing to bless, while his face seems to want to capture the moment reflected in the people’s gaze. Moments showing a pope in silence often appear, as he waits or listens, contemplating the whole world. This, perhaps, is also represented by the images of the cosmos taken from the International Space Station,  where astronauts from different nations have learned to live together.

On the trip to Cuba, we see the pontiff’s cape is continually lifted by the wind, as if to symbolize a pope who desires a Church filled with the wind of the Spirit, who disrupts, bringing  a new order into reality. This is a long, winding and exciting journey, composed of a series of official  images.

The director says: “I selected nearly 200 hours of material from 800 originals and found myself having to edit for a whole year until I arrived at an 80-minute summary for a film that remains deliberately open-ended.”[2] The viewer can thus better understand the complexity of Francis’ papacy that connects his international travels to his most powerful writings, such as the encyclicals Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti or the apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia.

Attention to human dramas

In Viaggio begins with a visit to Lampedusa in July 2013, a symbolic and paradigmatic start to Pope Francis’ desire to walk the paths of suffering, where mercy and pity have not prevailed over selfishness, on that small island overlooking a Mediterranean that has become an open-air tomb for countless migrants.

In 2015, the pope visited Cuba, where he affirmed the importance of the ability to dream and  be open, in the knowledge that the world can be different. Several times Francis has spoken of the moral duty to dream, as is also attested in the TV series aired on Netflix, Stories of a Generation  – with Pope Francis, where he declared, “We all need to dream, consciously or unconsciously,” or as heard in the 2016 video message addressed to young Cubans, “To be bearers of hope you need not to lose the capacity to dream. Remember that this ability to dream must enter into the objectivity of life, and that those who do not have the ability to dream are closed up in themselves. I would add again: those who do not have the ability to dream have already retired.” Dreams are always aimed at not allowing oneself to be entangled by the transience and limitedness of reality, by the narrow gaze of the hic et nunc; the dream and the mission constitute that openness to the Beyond, which for Pope Francis is embodied in the figure of Jesus Christ.

Images from the 2018 trip to Chile emerge on the screen, with the visit to the Women’s Penitentiary Center, where Francis speaks about the dignity to be guarded. Beyond the evil that has been done, it becomes fundamental to safeguard the dignity of the person, which is an indispensable aspect, as it can be transmitted outside oneself. We can see, too, the tense moments the pope experienced regarding some of the abuse by clergy, showing how extremely delicate and complex it is to be able to speak without being misunderstood when there are deep wounds still open and bleeding.

Then there is the intensity of the footage covering  the trip to the Philippines in 2015, with the pope visiting the people still scarred by the damage of Typhoon Yolanda in 2013. Very severe weather during the papal visit did not prevent the faithful from going out into the muddied streets to greet and stand beside the pope. In the hugs and greetings he gives, we understand the response to that initial statement in which he said that we live in a society that has forgotten the experience of weeping. The answer comes through the images: only the poor know how to cry; those tears in meeting with the pope reflect a mixture of joy and sorrow, pity and resentment, mercy and despair.

The Hand of Cain

The film documents how wide and deep the crises are that are still being triggered in the world, and the perspective it offers is wide and sharp. It becomes clear as the images unfold that poverty is not inevitable, but a consequence of that spirit of Cain with which, as the pope argues, human beings so often fall in love. Evil, the hand that man too often raises against his fellow man, contaminates the world, as shown by the genocide that took place in Armenia – a country Francis visited in 2016 – or as witnessed by the dramatic situation in Ciudad Juárez, a border area between Mexico and the United States, where the pope said, “A passage, a path laden with terrible injustices: enslaved, kidnapped, subject to extortion, many of our brothers and sisters are the victims of human trafficking.”

By means of a  disturbing, panoramic shot of the cities of Mosul and Qaraqosh, visited by the pope during his trip to Iraq in 2021, the effect of the war and its devastation is shown, while we listen to Francis’ slowly spoken words: “Hostility, extremism and violence do not come from a religious soul, they are betrayals of religion. War is madness. War disrupts everything, even the bond between brothers; its plan of development is destruction.” Indeed, even religions are not exempt from evil, which takes over the moment they do not recognize each other, generating hatred and violence. In 2015, when visiting the Central African Republic, or during the ecumenical visit to the Holy Land in 2014, the pope vigorously affirmed that Christians, Muslims and Jews are all brothers. The moment religion mixes with power, selfishness and private interests, poverty and destitution, hatred and flight are unleashed, which will always carry with them the mark of vengeance, the hand of Cain.

The seed of peace

As the footage moves between airports, celebrations, hugs and glances at ordinary people and institutional moments with government leaders, the main desire of Francis’ pontificate is to be an instrument of peace becomes clear. His travels thus become seeds of peace sown on the often-stony ground, but not without the capacity to welcome others. In the Arab Emirates in 2019, following in the footsteps of St. Francis of Assisi, who in 1219 met the Sultan of Egypt, al-Malik al-Kamil, the pope testified to his desire to reconnect with other religions through the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together, signed by him and the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, Ahamad al-Tayyeb.

The footage continues up to 2022, with excerpts  from visits to Canada and Malta. Space is also devoted to the early years of the Covid-19 pandemic, which made travel abroad impossible. The director chooses to symbolize it through those now-famous images of the pope on Good Friday 2020, alone in the rain-soaked St. Peter’s Square.

Rosi intersperses the official footage of the pope’s travels with some harsh and tragic clips from his films Fire at Sea, about the island of Lampedusa, where many Mediterranean migrants make landfall, and from Notturno (2020), about the wars in Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon, showing them as short flashbacks that highlight the urgency of visiting some wounded lands that need to be cared for, cherished, healed.

Brief but significant are the musical elements that embellish the images, chosen with the advice of ethno-musicologist, Ambrogio Sparagna. It is music that comes from afar, sung during papal visits. They gather millenary traditions, typical of folk songs continuing to survive, because they tell of sorrows, joys and forgiveness. From Aramaic songs to Native American songs in Canada, all were recorded live during papal travels.

As the credits roll, we hear an intimate and touching version of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, that prayer which is evocative of a peace that must be asked of God and built through the forgiveness and commitment of all men and women of goodwill.

DOI: La Civiltà Cattolica, En. Ed. Vol. 7, no.1 art. 1, 0123: 10.32009/22072446.0123.1

[1] Cf. V. Fantuzzi, “‘Sacro Gra’, a documentary by Gianfranco Rosi”, in Civ. Catt. 2013 III 603-606; Id., “‘Fuocoammare’, a documentary by Gianfranco Rosi”, ibid., 2016 II 187-191.

[2] G. Fantasia, “Con In Viaggio Gianfranco Rosi a Venezia racconta il mondo con gli occhi di papa Francesco”, in Elle Decor (www.elledecor.com/it/lifestyle/a41155093/con-in-viaggio-gianfranco-rosi-a-venezia-racconta-il-mondo-con-gli-occhi-di-papa-francesco), September 11, 2022.