Sur­vivors of the church reclaim their sto­ries in the Pro­ces­sion trailer

In the state of Mis­souri, over a course of decades, hun­dreds of priests in the Catholic church abused vul­ner­a­ble young men par­tic­i­pat­ing in the faith as altar boys. Some of these cas­es have con­clud­ed with sen­tences, but many oth­ers remain in a legal lim­bo, and count­less more will nev­er be tried.

Robert Greene​’s new doc­u­men­tary Pro­ces­sion trains its focus on this cul­ture of insti­tu­tion­al rot and makes a bold, inno­v­a­tive effort to find some per­son­al jus­tice for those affect­ed by it. The film chron­i­cles the director’s close col­lab­o­ra­tion with six men – Joe Eldred, Mike Fore­man, Ed Gav­a­gan, Dan Lau­rine, Michael San­dridge, and Tom Viviano – as they write and pro­duce short films styl­iz­ing their mem­o­ries of these dif­fi­cult experiences.

In keep­ing with the meth­ods of Greene’s oth­er works, the tech­nique employs the arti­fice of cin­e­ma in search of deep­er emo­tion­al truth, an approach evi­dent in this instance with the brief flash­es of sur­re­al­ism in the short films. In one strik­ing moment, a priest’s eyes glow green with men­ace, speak­ing more close­ly to how the par­tic­i­pants in this exer­cise remem­ber things hap­pen­ing than some objec­tive reality.

But the film also spends a lot of time on the process itself, not just the results; see­ing these men find kin­dred spir­its in one anoth­er, shar­ing pri­vate feel­ings to which no one else can ful­ly relate, is just as cru­cial to the over­all project of heal­ing. As the par­tic­i­pants act in each other’s films, they con­front shame and repres­sion that’s been sim­mer­ing for years, and accept that it doesn’t have to define the entire­ty of their lives.

With glow­ing reviews from Tel­luride and its con­tro­ver­sial hot-but­ton sub­ject mat­ter, this could very well be Netflix’s big bet for doc­u­men­tary-relat­ed awards, so expect to hear much more about it as 2021 winds down. Har­row­ing, intel­li­gent, and bound­less­ly empa­thet­ic, it’ll deserve all the recog­ni­tion it gets.

Pro­ces­sion comes to cin­e­mas in the US in ear­ly Novem­ber, and then Net­flix on 19 November.