Valdenses

In 1924, an Italian silent film called Fideli per Secoli told the story of the Waldensians, a medieval movement the Vatican had branded heretical eight centuries earlier and that had somehow survived the Inquisition, the French crown's campaigns, and every attempt to erase it from the Piedmont valleys it called home. Fascism did to the film what it could not quite do to the church: it banned it, and Fideli per Secoli disappeared for decades.

When it resurfaced, the Argentine-Italian director Marcel Gonnet Wainmayer built an entire documentary around its recovery. Valdenses, released in 2015 and co-produced across Argentina and Torino, does not simply screen the restored silent footage. It sets it beside a theatre group performing the same Waldensian history on a stage today, cutting between the two so that medieval persecution and a present day rehearsal answer each other, what the film itself describes as "a mirrors' game between fiction and reality."

The story Valdenses tells reaches past Italy. The Waldensians the film traces are described as an eight hundred and fifty year old peasant community that became, by most accounts, the world's first Protestant church, one still present today not only in the Piedmont valleys but in congregations across Argentina, Uruguay and the United States, the same communities the Waldensian Evangelical Church now carries forward. The documentary is an outsider's account of that history, not the church's own telling of it, but it is a careful one, built from a film the church's own persecutors once thought they had destroyed for good.