Earlier this academic year Olivia Welch, previously at Amery Hill School and Elanor Wilde, previously at Frensham Heights School entered the University of Cambridge Faculty of Divinity “RE:view The Cambridge Religion on Film Competition”. The competition encourages creative filmmaking in documentary or fictional genres. The competition is held every year and the topic is announced in early Autumn. Students of any subject can take part.
This year, the theme was ‘Religious Spaces’. Olivia and Elanor’s short film, Rituals, is an unorthodox but compelling approach to this subject and a great collaboration. They have been awarded joint first prize and received their award and prize money in a special event held at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge last week.
If you would like to watch the film, please click here.
Rituals takes an unorthodox approach to treating religious spaces in order to investigate how people may create their own religious spaces outside of conventional places of worship. It explores the life of a prostitute whose religious space is that of her room where she meets her customers. Throughout the course of the narrative we see some of the rituals that the prostitute carries out, both religious and secular, some of these rituals consist of her counting her money that is stored in a hollowed-out bible and performing cleansing procedures after visitations. One of the intentions of the piece is to allow viewers to sympathise with the protagonist as she is trapped in a cycle of corrupting her body whilst staying strong to her faith until she finds the courage to escape.
Congratulations to both girls on a fantastic achievement.