PROCESSION

Procession

Directed by Robert Greene
U.S | 2021 | Documentary
118 minutes | Robert Greene

In “Procession,” six men from Kansas City, Mo. — all survivors of childhood sexual assault at the hands of Catholic priests and clergy — come together to direct a drama-therapy-inspired experiment designed to collectively work through their trauma. As part of a radically collaborative filmmaking process with SLIFF alum Robert Greene (the award-winning “Bisbee ’17”), the men — Joe Eldred, Mike Foreman, Ed Gavagan, Dan Laurine, Michael Sandridge, and Tom Viviano — create fictional scenes based on memories, dreams, and experiences, exploring the church rituals, culture, and hierarchies that enabled silence around their abuse. In the face of a failed legal system, these men reclaim the spaces that allowed their assault, revealing the possibility for catharsis and redemption through a newfound fraternity. The filmmaker-in-chief at the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri, Greene will receive the fest’s Contemporary Cinema Award. The LA Times writes: “‘Procession’ has a particularly bracing directness, a refusal to distance or over-intellectualize pain. What begins as an anxious, sometimes awkward exercise in performance therapy gradually evolves into a cumulatively shattering vision of male friendship and strength in the face of evil.”