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A new project from Academy Award-winner Martin Scorsese is illuminating the lives of saints in: Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints. This eight-part docudrama series – a style that melds historical events with dramatic fictionalization – is streaming now on the FOX Nation streaming service, and begins with four famed Catholic martyrs.
Scorsese wears several hats for the series, from host, to narrator, and even executive producer, sharing personal anecdotes and reflections on the life stories of Catholic saints along the way. The trailer alone was enough to build excitement, teasing breathtaking cinematography, detail-oriented period-appropriate costumes, and a range of intense acting performances.
The first four episodes examine the lives of St. Joan of Arc, St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. Sebastian, and St. John the Baptist.
The trailer shows how the show runners took very different approaches to the cinematography of each era. For example, where Joan of Arc’s episode looks like a vivid step into Arthurian legend, Maximilian Kolbe’s grim tale from Auschwitz is filmed in a bleak black and white.
Scorsese loves the saints
Scorsese opened up about why he took the project, explaining that he developed a love for the saints during his Catholic upbringing. He recalled how statues in local churches always made him curious about the stories behind the poses:
“…what was fascinating to me was certainly the statues of these people, the men and the women. And somehow the stories that these statues implied or suggested, whether it was a statue of Santa Lucia, with the eyes on the plate that she had, or Saint Rocco with his finger pointing to his wound on his leg and a little dog at his feet,” Scorsese said.
The esteemed director went on to lament that it can be difficult to bring up Christianity in the modern day.
Noting that oftentimes, “They look at me and they say, you believe in that stuff?,” he mused that it seems “many people are trying to find religion outside of religion.”
Still, he upheld that Christianity is a religion "for the people, for friends," claiming that waking through the door of Christianity opens you to "radical love and radical redemption and radical acceptance."
"I used the term radical because these things are always revelatory. You really are to love and to accept and to allow redemption.” Scorsese continued, “In order to do that, you have to expose yourself. You have to risk failure and embarrassment and rejection, all of this, at any given moment. But that's what gives you a way of possibly seeing more widely and deeply, widely and deeply through and beyond that which is the material, material possessions.”
Risk-takers
The saints, Scorsese explained, are an excellent example of taking such a risk, as many of them put their lives on the line in order to follow Jesus Christ. He described the saints as “extraordinary people, who stood up to injustice and cruelty, and risked their lives to help other people,” but he also drew attention to the miracles attributed to their intercession, two of which must be proven for them to be canonized.
Still, Scorsese highlighted that sainthood is less emphasized by the miracles performed after death than by the extraordinary acts of their holy lives.
Offering examples from Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints, he cited the double life lived by St. Sebastian as he hid his Christian conversion from his fellows in the Roman Pretorian, continuing to convert those around him; or the turmoil St. John the Baptist must have experienced knowing that his ministry would ultimately lead to his execution.
He also pointed to the extraordinary story of Joan of Arc, with which the series begins.
“Fourteen-year-old girl hears voices. The voices of saints. The Word of God. They tell her to dress in men's clothes, organize an army, lead French soldiers into battle to put the Armagnac king on the throne, which she does. She becomes a political liability. She's captured, she's tried, she's condemned, she's burned at the stake.”
The first episode of Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints, featuring Joan of Arc, releases today, November 17, 2024, on the FOX Nation streaming service, with the second installment (St. Maximilian Kolbe) releasing on December 8.
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