Documental

Have you ever met an angel?

Marcela Said, documentary filmmaker: “Josse Van der Rest is the closest thing to an angel I have ever met.”

The filmmaker Marcela Said created this documentary about a surprising priest: the Belgian nobleman Josse Van der Rest, “The father of the half-houses”. She says she was fascinated by his mobilizing spirit, his clear eyes, and his Spanish, full of swear words, learned during land occupations. Convinced that all sorts of people exist everywhere, she champions a pastor whom she compares to a black swan in times when everyone criticizes priests.

“As I explain in the documentary, the idea came about after meeting him at the Hogar de Cristo (Home of Christ). I was impressed by his charisma, and one day my brother Sergio told me he was working with him at the Fundación Vivienda (Housing Foundation). I simply told him that I would love to film Josse, that I remembered perfectly that priest with piercing blue eyes and a foreign accent whom I had met by chance at the Hogar de Cristo headquarters,” says the filmmaker.

Marcela doesn't delve at all into Josse's status as a Belgian nobleman and son of a wealthy family. His life, which truly reads like an action novel, with his time as a young soldier and sniper for the Allied troops during World War II and his spiritual conversion amidst the war's destruction—a conversion he recounted many times and which led him to the Society of Jesus—didn't particularly interest Marcela. She writes: “His experiences in the war or his privileged background don't seem relevant to me. Many 'revolutionaries' and many priests in Chile come from bourgeois families. Besides, in every interview, it seems that's what attracts the most attention, when what really matters isn't where he comes from, but who he became and the immense work he left behind.” And in her final response, the author of the critical documentary about Opus Dei states: “The other thing that seemed important to me was to portray this priest at a time when priests have such a bad reputation, in which we only talk about 'pedophile priests' or abusers. I defend the idea that there are all kinds of people everywhere and that the Church and many of its priests have been very important in the recent history of Chile. The Vicariate of Solidarity is an example of this.”