About

“While making [Diary of a Country Priest] I began to better understand what I was doing. The field of cinematography is immeasurable and full of shadows. I find my way like a blind man in a kingdom of the involuntarily (or, perhaps, voluntarily) sightless. To capture the real in flight.” – Robert Bresson

Six years after the release of his second feature film Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne 1945, Bresson returned to filmmaking with Diary of a Country Priest. Eschewing professional actors, Bresson’s singular cinematographic style began to fulsomely take shape with this adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s novel.

The film tracks a new priest as he takes over a parish in a small French village. Recording his life in his diary as he suffers from physical ailments and faces the peculiar hostility of the locals, he documents his own wavering faith as the obligations of his duty and the enduring silence of God wrench at his soul. Bresson’s newfound minimalism purely expresses the complex interiority of his protagonist in one of the medium’s most moving explorations of faith and loss.

Ages 15+