The director of “There Be Dragons,” a film about Opus Dei founder St.
Josemaría Escrivá, sees the saint's message that God can be found in
everyday life as central to his latest movie.
“It’s not that a saint gets some inner truth and now there are no
struggles,” Joffe told CNA.
It’s not, “I’m just a saint and everything
works. No, a saint has to struggle every day.”
“Saints are fundamentally and totally human. It’s their very humanity that makes them able to be saints.”
Joffe said the film expresses the Spanish saint’s deeply held belief
that God can be found in everyday life – even during a civil war – and
that everyone can be a saint.
“There Be Dragons,” is set during the Spanish Civil War of the mid-
to late 1930s, a period the director describes as “the seminal moment in
Josemaria’s life.”
One of the central themes Joffe explores in the film is forgiveness,
which he calls a “gift” and “central message” of Christianity.
Forgiveness “acts to free both parties,” Joffe said, explaining that
“it acts to free the person doing the forgiveness and it obviously acts
to free the person being forgiven.”
“If we have to forgive somebody, we have to forgive something that
has caused an immense amount of pain and there will be a great cost and a
great struggle in being able to forgive, but that’s the Christian
message: that that struggle itself is worthwhile,” said Joffe, who has
described himself as a “wobbly agnostic.”
“There Be Dragons” is not just for Catholics, though. “This movie is
100% about humanity. We have tested it with believers, nonbelievers,
Asians, Americans, Africans, everyone,” Producer Ignacio Gómez Sancha
told Rome Reports, “and it touched the heart of all of them, so nobody
should feel left out!”
The film made its debut in Spain on March 25. It will be released in
the U.S. on May 6 and will premier in Columbia and Mexico on August 5.