Muddy roads, rusted cars, makeshift shelters and piles of garbage: The desolate images at the beginning of German director Milo Rau's new film, The New Gospel, show how farm workers live near the southern Italian city of Matera.

Most of them are African refugees. They have no residence permit and work for hours under the scorching sun or in the freezing cold for a pittance in the tomato fields and orange plantations. They are hired and supervised by Italian foremen, the "caporali." The mafia controls the agricultural economy in the Matera region, there is no way around their contact men.

Inspired by reality

When Swiss director Milo Rau visited Matera for the first time in 2017, he saw the legendary locations where Pier Paolo Pasolini and Mel Gibson shot The Gospel according to St Matthew (1964) and The Passion of the Christ (2004) respectively. 

Rau also went out to the field workers' camps. He was shocked by what he saw. "After two days, I was completely devastated, and I was like, 'How can you survive and keep up your energy even for a week?"' Rau told DW. "It's really cold there in the winter, there's incredible violence and you're starving."

The conditions in the camps near the 2019 European Culture Capital reminded him of the situation described in the New Testament: "Roman occupation, the exploitation of people without rights." It was precisely in this place that he came up with the concept for The New Gospel: Rau wanted to retell the story of Jesus with amateur actors. He wanted to show the refugees' everyday lives.

The roles of Jesus of Nazareth, the 12 Apostles, the Pharisees and Romans were played by activists, field workers, former prostitutes, farmers, as well as actors and actresses from the older renditions of the story of Jesus: Maia Morgenstern, who played Mary in Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, and the recently deceased Enrique Irazoqui, who starred as Jesus in Pasolini's The Gospel According to Matthew.

Lasting art project

The New Gospel is marked by the charisma and authenticity of its actors. Yvan Sagnet plays Jesus of Nazareth, and he also plays himself: a social activist who wants to put an end to the workers' intolerable living conditions in the tomato fields. For years, Sagnet, who was awarded the Italian order of merit "Ordine al Merito della Repubblica" and founded the international NoCap network, has campaigned against agricultural labor exploitation and for fair-trade products produced entirely without the structures of the local mafia.

Papa Latyr Faye, the founder and president of "Casa Sankara - Ghetto Out" organization, plays Peter. In the film and in everyday life, he fights for self-determination for day laborers and procures decent housing and legal, self-managed jobs for them.

The film was "an opportunity to reach a wider audience with the things we do and to spread the message that we are protagonists. We are people who want to decide about our future. We don't want to live in dependencies, we want to leave them behind," Faye told DW.

 

The film did not feel strange to them, instead it became part of their everyday lives as activists, he added. "It allowed us to build and strengthen international contacts, a new step in our struggle that we were able to use productively."

Artistic challenge

German producer Arne Birkenstock supported Rau's project. The filmmaker and the producer have known each other for a long time, and began to cooperate after the release of Rau's 2017 documentary The Congo Tribunal.

"With the story of the Passion of Christ, Milo takes one of the fundamental Western myths and at the same time tells the story of the West's current moral failure — for instance in the refugee crisis and in the fact that the West at least tolerates the conditions on the plantations," Birkenstock told DW. "We Germans don't even have to look to southern Italy — just look at the conditions in the local meat industry."

The project was challenging from an artistic point of view, too. Reality and fiction needed to be interwoven, including "the great models of former films, from Pasolini to Gibson, the political campaign, the making of, and the systematic exploitation of refugees and farm workers."

Activism and aesthetics

Thanks to editor Katja Dringenberg, the various levels of the film come together as one, both in terms of content and aesthetics.

Another reason why Rau's project succeeded is that he took a step back and gave his protagonists the space they needed. "You really have to work together, you have to give yourself a lot of time. These are processes that don't stop with the end of the shoot," Rau argued. "You need a lot of trust in other people, which is not easy for an artist," he added. "You create an experimental field, and then whatever happens, happens."

The New Gospel also openly shows actual conflicts among the protagonists and interweaves them with the story.

Rau has been exploring the interfaces between art and politics, between aesthetics and activism for years. "When you work with Milo, you never just make a film," Arne Birkenstock said.

Social message

Milo Rau's The New Gospel is the first European film starring a Black Jesus, the first Gospel story featuring refugees and a mixed cast of Jews, Muslims and Christians. And it is much more: Rau managed to push aside the religious, traditional and mystical elements of the story of the Passion of Christ, and expose its essence, its radical social message.

Rau's film is not only highly political, it is radically human. The New Gospel is a masterpiece that is as convincing as it is moving.

 

Translated from German by Dagmar Breitenbach.