Martin Scorsese will produce a new documentary featuring an on-camera interview with Pope Francis that was recorded at Vatican City in December, a few months before the pope died at the age of 88.
The film, “Aldeas — A New Story,” is about the worldwide cultural project developed by Scholas Occurrentes, a global educational movement founded by Francis in 2013, the same year he was elected pope. Communities around the world will create scripts for short films that highlight their identities, histories and values.
Snippets of the conversation between the pope and Scorsese will be interwoven into the film, which does not have a release date.
In a statement on Wednesday, Scorsese said it was important to Francis for “people across the globe to exchange ideas with respect while also preserving their cultural identity, and cinema is the best medium to do that.” Before the pope’s death, Francis called “Aldeas” a poetic project because it “goes to the roots of what human life is.”
The project punctuates a long relationship between the pope and Scorsese, whose work has sometimes been religious in nature. When “The Last Temptation of Christ” was released in 1988, it drew protests and outrage from religious groups.
In 2016, Scorsese met with Francis to discuss his movie “Silence,” a drama about a Portuguese Jesuit priest who heads to 17th-century Japan, where Christians are persecuted. They met again in 2023, when Scorsese announced he would make another film about Jesus. The director’s most recent project, “Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints,” dramatizes the lives of eight Catholic saints.
When Francis died, Scorsese said in a statement to Variety that he was lucky to have known him and that his loss for the world was immense.
“He had an ironclad commitment to the good,” Scorsese said. “He knew in his soul that ignorance was a terrible plague on humanity. So he never stopped learning. And he never stopped enlightening.”