Jesus You Know (DVD), Kino Lorber, Documentary

An "unblinking exploration of one of the most private of human experiences" (Dana Stevens, New York Times), Jesus, You Know captures six Catholics - of different ages, backgrounds and genders - in a series of confessional dialogue with both Jesus and an omnipresent movie camera. Directed by controversial Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl (Dog Days), this "deeply moving documentary of individual confessions made inside empty churches. Separated by nothing but choral music and brief takes from the lives of the interviewed subjects, these spoken confessions combine the invisibility of direct cinema with abrupt addressed to the divine and are uncomfortable intimate. When a middle-aged woman stares at a statue of Jesus and nags that "problems don't get discussed..." and are "just watched on TV," she speaks to a triad of characters: herself, the camera and Jesus. And when an older man ventures into unanswerable questions ("Why did my parents abuse me?), the church's elongated vaults turns his individual pain into rhetorical phenomenology. More concerned with complexity that with final judgments, Seidl allows every confessional instance to find it's own idiosyncratic Jesus - even while leaving the threat of existential emptiness in the final equation.

• JESUS YOU KNOW
• Documentary
• Kino Lorber
• R