Hlynur Pálmason’s arrestingly beautiful historical drama Godland depicts a 19th-century Danish priest’s gradual mental and physical decay as he oversees the construction of a Lutheran church in a remote corner of Iceland.

Through the young priest’s failure to take the land and its people on their own terms, the film lays bare the arrogance of man in the face of the indifferent hostility of nature, and explores the spiritual strife inherent to colonial projects.

This season draws together films that similarly depict the crises of faith and spiritual malaise of isolated men of God –presenting portraits of stubborn outsiders, often bent on conquering or evangelising communities and environments that reject them.

Encompassing several centuries and continents, the season begins in the murkiness of medieval Russia with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, followed by the ruthless colonial invasions of the Conquistadors in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, before turning to the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who find their faith tested in 17th-century Japan in Martin Scorsese’s recent epic Silence. Robert Bresson’s stylistically sparse and sublime Diary of a Country Priest brings us into the 20th century, and offers a template that Paul Schrader revisits (and revises) in First Reformed, which aptly translates this recurrent thread of spiritual struggle to the existential threats of the present.

---