Pope Francis: A Man of His Word

The documentary is built from Pope Francis speaking about poverty, the environment, migration, inequality and the church's own failures. The form is unusual: he looks straight into the camera and addresses the viewer, and the person asking is never on screen. Black and white reenactments shot in Assisi are cut in, referring to Francis of Assisi, whose name he took. Wim Wenders wrote, produced and directed. The project was not his idea: in 2014 the Vatican sent him a letter asking him to lead a project about Pope Francis. He took it while keeping final cut for himself. Wenders shot the interview sessions, the reenactments and the footage around Assisi himself; most of the remaining material came from television stations and the Vatican archives. It is a Swiss, Italian, French and German co-production. It screened at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and opened in the United States on 18 May 2018. The worldwide box office was 8.6 million dollars, 2 million of it domestic and 6.5 million international. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 82 percent and Metacritic at 63. Who it is for: anyone curious about Wenders as a documentarian and about the direct-address form. Who it is not for: viewers expecting a critical portrait. The film began at the Vatican's invitation and asks the pope no difficult questions.