5/5
Robert Greene’s Procession is an exceptionally moving documentary that utilizes the tools of filmmaking as a means for the film’s participants to continue their work facing and recovering from the abuse and trauma they experienced as children. Through the use of recreation and cinematic reinterpretation of the survivors’ traumatic experiences, they’re able symbolically interrupt their abuse and protect their younger selves, speak truth into their past, and face the physical spaces in which they were abused in order to have them loom less ominously in their lives. The use of the same child actor across the scenes is a powerful choice that serves to highlight the repeated patterns of abuse throughout the Catholic Church. Greene works closely with the survivors, allowing them to shape the work to suit the needs of their recovery, rather than the needs of the film. It continues in Greene’s exploration of the act of filmmaking and performance as a means of healing, and it gives agency to these men who had their agency taken from them as children, who have repeatedly been denied justice. In a year when documentaries have crossed so many ethical lines, it’s refreshing to see a film that consistently gives its subjects such control over the process, that checks in with its participants at every step along the way, and that is always attempting to put the welfare of those involved above the finished work. And that final work is a film of tremendous empathy and compassion, an overwhelmingly emotional exploration of trauma and the healing that can come through connection and community.
