Luke Lorentzen won the Best Director prize at Sundance 2023 for his A Still Small Voice. The film follows Mati, a chaplain completing a year-long hospital residency, as she learns to provide spiritual care to people confronting profound life changes. Through Mati’s experiences with her patients, her struggle with professional burnout, and her own spiritual questioning, we gain new perspectives on how meaningful connection can be and how painful its absence is.
Lorentzen speaks about his film with Alexander Nanau, director of Collective which, in 2021, was nominated in the Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature Film categories.
“The first seed for the idea was my sister who works as a hospital chaplain,” Lorentzen explains. “When we first talked together [about the project in 2019] she was beginning a residency in spiritual care and sharing with me the work, but not just how meaningful the conversations were that she was trying to have with patients but this whole reflective side of building capacity within yourself and working with a cohort of people to learn how to be a more empathetic, more open-minded person.”
“I don’t come from a particularly religious background and it was my sister who was able to show me this whole side of the field that wasn’t rooted in a specific belief system but was actually intending to understand all belief systems and find a way of meeting a patient or person where they are,” Lorenzen continues. “And I found that really fascinating: learning to juggle all of the different ways in which humans make meaning, and have a knowledge of that, so you can walk into the room and connect. It felt very parallel to what I do as a filmmaker.”
Click here to watch the whole conversation between Luke Lorentzen and Alexander Nanau.
