Jesus, You Know

A return for Seidl to his customary field following his fictional debut Dog Days, this portrait of six Catholics revealing themselves in their prayers and supplications to Jesus (Seidl's camera, set up in a church altar) won Best Documentary prize at Karlovy Vary. Varying from the banal and comic (a woman complaining of her husband's TV choice) to the deeply personal and searing (nursing her sick husband, a despairing woman questiones the received church wisdom that 'suffering makes us good'), Seidl's spare and rigorously edited documentary raises many arresting questions about the relationships, both spiritual and temporal, of these poor souls, but leaves them all discomfortingly unanswered.