At the beginning of Woman of God, Pastor Jana seems an austere and conservative figure as she takes mass and serves communion in dark robes and sensible spectacles.
But very soon, she reveals herself to be anything but. She may have come from a family of pastors (her mother was the first female pastor in Slovenia) but she was a total party animal when she was a student (even one who studied divinity). She drinks a lot, smokes like a chimney, and wears jean and leather jackets or purple hippy garb while tending her allotment. What’s more, she is happy to drive her car at speed with her mobile clamped to her ear, overtaking as she goes.
Jana is also a maverick sermon-giver who is prepared to amuse (kids) and bemuse (conservative parishioners) in equal measure as she performs a Q&A with a puppet on matters divine.
But her marriage is troubled. As director Maja Prettner notes, she is as different from her ostensibly inoffensive husband as a cat is from a mouse. As a child, her father (also a pastor) was an aggressive drunk, and Jana would scream into her pillow so as to drown out the sound of family rows. “Small words become bigger, and a heart is of wounds,” her mother recalls. At one point, however, we also watch the reactions of Jana’s daughter Miladka, as Jana and her husband row and bicker off camera.
Jana was sexually abused between the ages of six and ten by a friend of the family, which she subsequently learned to rationalise by believing that the perpetrator was merely “sick.” But she only divulged this recently to her mother, and more less kept the information suppressed for over 30 years.
“All of her relationships in life are broken because of her upbringing and sexual abuse,” Prettner reveals of the Jana she came to know. “And I do think that she has a really spoiled image of what a family should look like and what relationships mean.”
But as the film progresses, Jana begins to reassess her life, her marriage and her ecumenical calling, as well as a recently diagnosed illness which she sees as part of the “holistic” business of living, and whose cause should be addressed as thoroughly as its consequences. So little by little, she begins to deal with her “unprocessed emotions from childhood,” as she looks to her future.
Director Maja Prettner and DOP Jože Glažar were from the same region in Slovenia as Jana, and were aware of this “controversial” cleric. “She always had funny, interesting stuff to say when she was in the media or whatever,” Prettner stresses. “Fifteen years ago she said she would have no problem marrying a gay couple – she was one of the few to say that out loud. So yeah, that’s what intrigued me to go and meet her and see her, and I was basically interested in the woman pastor position in general because we live in a patriarchal world. It’s a bit different than in England where you’re maybe more used to women being pastors, but here in Slovenia this is not the case.”
What’s more, director Prettner saw a dichotomy in her subject. Jana was somebody who was devout but at the same time more human than most.
“She caught me right away with her funny character and she was interesting, edgy and self-reflective and very straightforward. Basically she can’t stop talking,” says the director. “She is very contradictory, especially from a pastor who you would expect to be without sin and has high moral standards and is basically supposed to be an idol of the society.”
Prettner tells how, early on in the production, Jana “planted a seed of doubt” as to whether she could remain in the Church.
“We were like, okay, this could be interesting. If she really leaves the church, that would be a really big thing because she basically cuts the cord of her family tradition and it’s a huge thing considering that she grew up behind church walls for 40 years up until that point,” the director tells BDE.
“You have to be quite brave because she doesn’t have a Plan B. What will she do and how she will she survive after she leaves the church?” Prettner remembers musing. “So yeah, basically this was the main thing we were following, but at the same time, all of this family drama and all of the traumas from the past began to appear and this was the second tier that we were trying to unravel.”
Jana’s revelations are very moving, and one assumes, made for the first time. These include a taboo-busting admission of her reaction to the abuse she suffered in her childhood.
“She poured out everything basically. I always say that the car was like a confession room. We spent a lot of time driving in the car when she was commuting from her hometown to all of the villages. Basically we spent two hours a day when we were driving, and in the car she revealed the most intimate stuff.”
The film was produced over five years, the last two of which were spent in the editing room. Over this period Prettner saw fundamental transformation in Jana. “She goes through these transitions and radical life-changing decisions that of course change her, change the way she thinks and change the way she acts. And she will have to, in a way, redefine herself within a new environment where she’s not safe and she doesn’t have a steady job and she will have to explain herself to her family over and over again why she’s made decisions that she’s done.”
But was Prettner herself part of Jana’s transformation process, or responsible for change within Jana’s family? “She [Jana] said it herself that basically she wouldn’t [have dug] that deep and she wouldn’t ask herself those questions. And it’s interesting because everything is out now. Maybe a lot of the things that she’s discussed, she didn’t reveal to her family before and now they opened [up to] the matters and the subjects that were pretty much closed before. So it was kind of a relief for her too.”
“And for me, it was really hard,” Prettner adds. “I was really nervous before the first premiere screening and how will her family react, and her father and mother, because it was painful for me to see all the family traumas being revealed on the screen, and I can’t imagine how it must have felt for them. But at the end, they were really pleased with the film and, I don’t know, hugged me and her and congratulated her for her bravery and that she [was] courageous enough to say that stuff. And basically her dad was like, ‘yeah, it was just like you described, I was a monster basically.’ So, I was really, really relieved when they accepted the movie so well. I would say that it transformed them [as well].”
