"Sometimes you make a film and sometimes a film makes you. Hand of God began as a nagging itch, built as a slow burn and ended with a familial handshake."
- Joe Cultrera, director and producer of Hand of God

Hand of God unfolds as the intimate story of a family, of a community, piecing together a life they didn't know was broken. Winner of Best Feature Documentary at the Tupelo Film Festival, Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Kansas and Ashland Independent Film Festivals, and awarded Special Recognition at the Boston International Film Festival, Hand of God is an honest, oftentimes funny, search for truth on a topic which has become all too familiar in this day and age. It is a story which sets out as a personal catharsis that led to uncovering the hypocrisy within the Catholic Church.

The Story

It begins with home videos from the 50's and 60's. Painting a picture of small-town Massachusetts, it shows of a household where paintings of stern-faced saints, bishops and cardinals line the walls, and the Cultrera children: Paul, Maria and Joe, slowly allow you to imagine a typical Italian-Catholic childhood. The story asks you to understand the crime of the situation and the sheer power the Catholic Church held and expected of its authority within the community. Filmmaker Joe Cultrera weaves together interviews with his brother Paul with visceral sights and sounds from a past which began with Paul serving as an altar boy under Father Joseph E. Birmingham at the St. James' Rectory in Salem, along with field trips and "night-time rides" in Birmingham's black Ford Galaxy.

Artistic Values

Hand of God pushes boundaries in its use of impressionistic sequences incorporating religious symbols. Porcelain altar boy dolls drowning in murky water, a crucifix swirling in liquid; these images depicting a loss of faith have angered and provoked those who question the appropriateness of the use of sacred Christian symbols within the film.

"[The film] would not rely on the iconic imagery the Church forced down our throats; instead it would twist those religious dioramas into unsettling expressions of the internal torrent they immersed us in."
- Joe Cultrera, director and producer of Hand of God

Questions Raised

As many answers that Paul and Joe Cultrera hoped to find in their search, they found it raised just as many questions. In 1992 Paul Cultrera refuses to be silent anymore and begins his own investigation into the abuse and Father Birmingham. What he uncovers are multitudes of victims and hundreds of stories that date back in all the towns where Father Birmingham once held sway. He reveals the enablers in the Catholic Church that knew about Father Birmingham's abuse, such as Father John B. McCormack, who simply chose to shuttle him from parish to parish in Massachusetts, without compassion, thought or recourse to his victims.

Hand of God raises questions about religion, about the policy the Catholic Church seem to have on protecting its own, and questions about blind faith, healing and the ability to start a dialogue as catharsis. In a world rife with documentary filmmakers, this film stands on its own as an intimate portrait of a family coping with the reality of the situation. What it means to be a family breathes life into every aspect of the filmmaking, eventually asking what it means to be known as "father."

Family Defined

What is evident throughout Hand of God is the strength of Paul Cultrera and his family, his honest and humorous refusal to be made a victim. Perhaps Paul says it best in the film, "It's not the story of my life. It's a thing that happened to me." As viewers, we ask ourselves, why and how could this have happened? We try to put ourselves in their shoes - after all, this is small-town America. If it happened there, it could happen anywhere, and like the communities affected decades ago, did anyone ever think to look?

"Hand of God" is about individuals finding their own way through faith, making space for each other, respecting and loving each other as individual, thoughtful spirits. My parents and sister have their spiritual way; Paul has his; I have mine. We share a spirit of family."
- Joe Cultrera, interview with PBS's FRONTLINE, January 16, 2007

Reviews, Reaction & Relevance

In The New York Times Alessandra Stanley, recognizing the importance of the film in an age when scandals over the Catholic Church abound in the media, said, "Hand of God is both an affidavit against the archdiocese and a novena to the Cultrera sons' elderly parents, who revered the church but loved their children more." In a climate where news stories about the Catholic Church, ranging from the resignation of Cardinal Bernard F. Law in 2002 and his later appointment in Rome to the scandal that surrounds former United States Representative Mark Foley, no longer seem out of the ordinary or unexpected, Hand of God is "potent" and "cerebral" (Dennis Harvey, Variety).

"That rare thing when it comes to works on this theme -- a film informed by passion without histrionics, and a sober and moving family saga." (Dorothy Rabinowitz, Wall St Journal)

"a provocative and powerful movie... Like a great detective story, Hand of God peels away layers of blind faith to reveal the truth." (The Orlando Sentinel)

With the passing of Pope John Paul II, and the subsequent election of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, the Roman Catholic Church numbered 1.1 billion members worldwide. (CNN.com, BBC.co.uk, NPR.org). Two years running including this year, documentaries on the subject of clergy sexual abuse have been nominated for Academy Awards. Hand of God premiered on Frontline PBS in mid January 2007. The programme which normally attracts 150 odd responses on average after each broadcast, this time received over 650 emails.

The subject has undoubtedly a wide audience following and film reviews have identified Hand of God as one of the superior works to have emerged on this topic in late 2006. The film is not just a story about a family coming to terms with a dirty past and the multitudes of tragedies it uncovered along the way. It moves beyond the personal dimension and into the wider picture by questioning the unquestionable - the unflinching faith in the sanctity of priesthood, in the corporation of the Catholic Church and in God.

"... this is not a film about the past. Despite the thousands of lives he has seriously damaged, John McCormack is still a CEO in the Catholic corporation. Cardinal Law has a great job in Rome... Bishop Richard Lennon, who shows his arrogance in our film, has been put in charge of the Diocese of Cleveland. ... And those are just the characters in this one small sampling of a film. ... [Cardinal Joseph] Ratzinger had first-hand knowledge of these abuses in his previous position and did nothing; now he's playing the role of Pope. It's hard to put it behind you when most of the players are still playing."
- Joe Cultrera, interview with PBS's FRONTLINE, January 16, 2007

And as the film ends with Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," you too know, that the rains are a-coming.

Hand of God official website
http://www.handofgodfilm.com

PBS's FRONTLINE - Hand of God website including Timeline, Interview with the Producers and Updates
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/handofgod/

The New York Times, Alessandra Stanley, "A Painful Account of Abuse and a Celebration of Family"
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/arts/television/16stan.html?ex=1326603600&en=8a878b7b3b57aa73&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Variety Review of Hand of God
http://www.handofgodfilm.com/pdfs/Variety.pdf

Gloucester Daily Times, Gail McCarthy, "The 'pure experience': Filmmaker documents brother's story to expose Catholic Church's 'blind faith' upbringing"
http://www.gloucestertimes.com/lifestyle/local_story_342120941/resources_printstory