Following his acclaimed trio of documentaries Sacro GRA, Fire at Sea, and Notturno, Italian director Gianfranco Rosi pivots a bit with next feature, this time focusing on a single figure––and perhaps one of the most well-known across the entire globe. In Viaggio, which has now added the subtitle of The Travels of Pope Francis after its Venice premiere last year, follows the Bishop of Rome during his vast travels. In fact, in the first nine years on the gig, he ventured to over 50 countries, to have a face-to-face interaction with this following him. Now set for a March 31 release, the new trailer has arrived from Magnolia Pictures.
David Katz said in his review, “Following The Young Pope, The New Pope, and The Two Popes, the time has officially come for the Woke Pope. In Viaggio, Gianfranco Rosi’s fascinating Rorschach test of a documentary, is also something of a People’s History of Pope Francis, pontiff since 2013, in that it largely consists of television broadcast footage of the man on his sundry global travels, though the filmmaker wisely deigns not to visualize his popular Twitter account. We don’t glimpse him from his own subjective point-of-view, as Fernando Meirelles and Jonathan Pryce attempted to show in their version; instead Rosi privileges what the global Roman Catholic membership and also what curious nonbelievers and secular onlookers observe—the dignified outer surface. And intriguingly enough, it’s a fairly flattering picture as one of the world’s oldest, most powerful institutions attempts some crisis PR in front of the contemporary world’s gaze.
See the trailer and poster below.
In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis opens on March 31 in theaters and on vOD.