Vatican film festival fosters debate about spirituality

Published: 2004-12-01

ROME (CNS) -- Representatives from the Vatican, the film world and academia met Dec. 1-2 to debate cinematic visions of people, their creations and their spirituality. The Vatican's eighth International Festival of Spiritual Cinema was to explore people's relationship with the technology they have created. The theme was "Man-Machine Hybridization, Identity and Conscience in Post-Modern Cinema." Fifteen films -- from "I, Robot" to "Men in Black" to "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- will be shown at a Rome movie theater Dec. 14-19. In opening remarks of the debate Dec. 1, Archbishop John P. Foley, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, said that cinema "has effectively represented the anxieties and fears tied to a future in which man must face the consequences of a hybridization with the machine that has been pushed to the extreme and that he himself has put into motion."

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