"As a Director I Want to Show My Own Failure, My Own Intrusion in the Films I Make”: Milo Rau on His Venice Premiering The New Gospel

Making its world premiere at this year’s — IRL! — Venice Film Festival, The New Gospel is the latest work of “utopian documentarism” from Swiss director/writer/critic/lecturer Milo Rau. (Though one might add “biblical provocateur.” As the newly installed artistic director of NTGent, Rau once took out classified ads in a Belgian newspaper seeking modern-day crusaders for a staging based on the city’s Jesus-themed Ghent Altarpiece. One read, “Did you fight for IS, or another religion?”) With The New Gospel, the multimedia artist tackles Italy’s ongoing migrant crisis through a most unusual form — by creating a contemporary Jesus film in Matera, the setting of both Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and before that Pasolini’s canonical The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

And to read my interview with the interventionist documentarian visit Filmmaker magazine.