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Jehovahs witness movie9/4/2023 ![]() ![]() Ivanna and Alex, if not Luisa, think of Armageddon, after which the Witnesses will spend eternity in paradise on earth, and feel nothing but excitement, a sense of imminent grace and bliss – and while they may be taciturn with each other, they have pretty regular conversations with God. This is not to say these women are unhappy, precisely that they feel they’re missing out. Siobhan Finneran and Molly Wright in Apostasy. But it’s also, par excellence, about the meagre world they inhabit, a realm that is unnervingly quiet (no music or television), frequently joyless (the Witnesses do not celebrate birthdays, Easter or Christmas, regarding such feast days as pagan), and almost entirely controlled by men (the zealous elders, who rule the roost entirely down at the Kingdom Hall). The film is about the three women’s faith, and all the ways in which it is tested. Luisa, however, has begun to doubt, and will soon, having become pregnant by her college boyfriend, find herself shunned by her mother and the community. Alex is also committed though she suffers from a serious blood condition, she has told her doctor that she would not want a transfusion even if it were a matter of life and death (Witnesses believe that those who respect life as a gift from God do not try to sustain it by the taking of blood, a doctrine they have followed since 1945). Ivanna is a devout Witness away from her job at the council, she spends her time handing out the Watchtower on the street, or at her local Kingdom Hall, listening to the elders preach about Armageddon, which is coming very soon and with it, paradise. There are the rules, and then there’s what people actually do.”Īpostasy is set in Oldham, or a place very like it, and centres on a family of three: Ivanna (Finneran, best known for roles in Happy Valley and Downton Abbey, who is quite superb) and her teenage daughters, Alex (Molly Wright) and Luisa (Sacha Parkinson). I needed it to be right.” Are Witnesses likely to choose to see it? “That depends. I didn’t want people still in the religion to be able to say: this is just propaganda. “I did feel a pressure to be as accurate and as honest as possible. One of the more remarkable things about Apostasy – and there are many it’s hard to imagine a more accomplished debut – is its even-handedness, the way it stirs in the audience sympathy for characters whose beliefs most of us might ordinarily struggle to understand. When I first got hold of one of these books, not long after I left the religion, I was literally shaking with fear – and when I started working on this project, that fear came right back.” Perhaps, though, this anxiety was also useful. We were made to feel it was almost on the level of being satanic. “As Witnesses, we were told to avoid literature that was critical of us. “Even before the shoot, this was a subject I was uncomfortable with,” he says. By the time we’d finished, I was 10 years older.”Įvery day brought with it the feeling of transgression. ![]() “When we started, I looked about my age, which is 37. “I lost loads of hair, as well,” he says, placing a hand ruefully on his head. It took this gentle, softly spoken man from Tameside, in Manchester, 21 days to shoot his film, and in that time his beard turned, somewhat dramatically, from mostly brown to mostly grey. Why on earth had he insisted on so many locations? What would it be like to give notes to his star, Siobhan Finneran? However, for Kokotajlo, whose quietly controlled screenplay is rooted in his upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness, there were other, deeper things going on, too. ![]() And just like any other tyro director, he brought with him all the usual doubts. His backers were expectant his budget was miniature far too many pages of the script over which he had laboured for so long needed to be filmed every single day. Making a film is always, at almost any given moment, difficult-verging-on-the-impossible, and Daniel Kokotajlo’s first feature was no exception. ![]()
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