“The fact is that the awakening we seek may depend upon the depth and richness of our uncertainty.” – Marilyn Sewell
Some people are easy to know right away. They’re the candles already carved and on display. Then there are people like Marilyn Sewell, minister of the First Unitarian Church in Portland, Oregon, who take time to know. And you stand in front of the candlemaking display, and you watch the candlemaker work his or her art, and you learn, layer by layer, what the candle is and what it can become. Is it better off as it is at that moment, with just a few carvings, or will it be better as a lighthouse, or with numerous interconnected bows?
The first 38 minutes go a long way in a 92-minute running time. And they last a long, long time. It doesn’t mean that Raw Faith goes on too long. This is a meditation on Marilyn Sewell’s life, who she was, who she is, who she wants to be, even as she struggles with that latter question. Her questions about her life are our questions. They take time. They’re not answered quickly, and they’re not absorbed so easily. While watching her, we examine ourselves.
Sewell tries to come to terms with her childhood, she and her siblings taken away from their mentally ill mother by their father, who couldn’t express his pain and so drank it down deep and hard, dying decades later of alcohol dementia. At the beginning, she lives alone and is content with it, although the loneliness sometimes pierces her deeply. In her position as the senior minister, she has to watch what she does, what she says, how she dresses, where she goes for entertainment, how she carries herself in public. She is the representative of that church and for 17 years, she has loved it deeply enough to make it her entire life, a life that includes two sons from a previous marriage that ended in divorce when the boys were three and five years old.
She wants to step back, and figure out what she truly wants. If she resigns from the church, she has to cut herself off for two years, losing her flock and losing that sense of community that she has established in a church that is accepting of everyone, no matter their religion, no matter their sexual orientation. The church will go on, much as the people in that church have such a bond with her, but will she? Can she see herself retired from the church? Can she make a new life for herself? She has never been in love, and along comes George Crandall, who she was helping through his grief over his wife’s death. He was on the facilities committee of the church, but never attended, never interested. It’s strange to her to say that she’s in love, and she’s baffled by it in one of a few video journals throughout Raw Faith. What if he leaves her? What if she wants him to leave?
Filmmaker Peter Weidensmith knows he is profiling a very special person, and he follows her respectfully and solemnly. This is her life, her words. He is just there to document what he believes in through her, the goodness of people no matter who they are. Everyone is welcome. Everyone matters. No moment ever feels staged. It feels like Weidensmith starts filming whenever Sewell is ready.
On this DVD from Alive Mind Cinema, a label that Kino Lorber should be extremely proud of what with this and El Bulli: Cooking in Progress and Griefwalker, there are additional interviews with Sewell, most interestingly about how the church expanded after Sewell declared it a hate-free zone during voter consideration of an anti-gay initiative. Two deleted scenes find Sewell in Washington, D.C., wishing that politicians could pay more attention to what matters in being human, in being loving, and then talking about declaring a hate-free society. Trailers for Brilliant Moon and American Mystic (which seems even-handed toward pagans and mediums alike) are also featured, and as if Raw Faith wasn’t enough proof, they show that Alive Mind Cinema has gone and is continuing to go places where other DVD labels aren’t, filling a niche that has sadly been underrepresented until now. Now it’s well-represented.
Thinking of all the reviews I’ve written from 1999 up to now, and of reviews to come, for however longer I do this, I don’t think I’ll ever come upon another documentary as incredible as Raw Faith, as touching, as awe-inspiring, and as inspiring. More than just documentaries, this rises above everything I’ve ever reviewed. At their best, this is what movies can do. It should become standard inspiration to those who want to do themselves what has been done here. The world could use more people like Marilyn Sewell, and more filmmakers like Peter Weidensmith.
