Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (2018)
Jorge Mario Bergoglio became the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church in March 2013, and from the moment he stepped onto the balcony of St Peter's Basilica and asked the crowd to pray for him before he blessed them, it was clear that something had shifted in the Vatican's public posture. Here was a Jesuit from Buenos Aires, the first Latin American pontiff, who had spent decades working in the slums of Argentina and who seemed genuinely ill at ease with the ceremonial grandeur of the papacy. That persona, whether you read it as authentic humility or as carefully managed image-making, made him a figure of real cultural fascination well beyond the world's 1.3 billion Catholics. The institutional Church was, at that point, still carrying enormous reputational damage from the abuse scandals that had rocked it for years. Francis represented, to many observers, a kind of reset: socially conscious, environmentally engaged, less interested in doctrinal rigidity than in pastoral warmth. Whether or not that impression holds up to scrutiny is exactly the kind of question a documentary filmmaker might reasonably want to pursue.
The man who took on that task was Wim Wenders, the celebrated German director best known for road movies and lyrical, slow-burning studies of loneliness and longing. His Paris, Texas (1984) remains one of the defining works of European art cinema's engagement with American landscapes and broken lives, and his broader career has always suggested a director interested in the spiritual and the human in roughly equal measure. He had also made documentaries before, most notably the Oscar-winning Buena Vista Social Club. On paper, Wenders and Francis seemed like a reasonable match: a contemplative filmmaker meeting a contemplative subject. The film was produced across five countries (France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the Holy See itself) through a consortium of production companies including the Vatican's own Centro Televisivo Vaticano, which is a detail worth pausing on. Officially granted access to film within Vatican City, the production carried Vatican involvement from the outset, and that structural fact hangs over the entire enterprise. The runtime is a trim 96 minutes, and the film was given a reasonably wide international release, picking up a screening at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section. Pope Francis himself appears throughout, responding to questions submitted by people from around the world, covering migration, ecology, poverty, consumerism and social justice. Joe Biden appears briefly, as do various religious figures including Sister María Eufemia Goycoechea and actor Ignazio Oliva, who provides a kind of narrative thread through the piece.
Documentary filmmaking at its best asks uncomfortable questions of powerful institutions, and some of the finest examples in recent years, from Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020) to the quieter but no less demanding I Am Not a Witch (2017), demonstrate that formal intelligence and genuine critical rigour are not mutually exclusive. The Pope, as a subject, is one of the most protected and mediated figures on the planet, surrounded by an institution with a very long memory and a very clear idea of how it wishes to be seen. That makes the access granted to Wenders either a tremendous opportunity or a potential trap, depending entirely on how the filmmaker chooses to use it.
The cover art for Wim Wenders’ 2018 documentary Pope Francis: A Man of His Word is genuinely quite cool. It’s striking, minimalist, and promises a profound, intimate look into the life of the modern pontiff. But once you actually press play, that sleek packaging quickly gives way to what is, without exaggeration, one of the most by-the-numbers documentaries I’ve ever sat through.
For a director with Wenders' pedigree, the final product feels remarkably safe, bordering on a glorified promotional video rather than a probing piece of cinema.
The most glaring issue is the sheer volume of stock footage woven throughout the runtime. While I entirely understand the logistical nightmare of shadowing the Pope, leaning so heavily on pre-existing clips feels a bit cheeky, if not entirely lazy. Instead of intimate, fly-on-the-wall access, we are treated to a polished montage of papal visits and sweeping aerial shots that you could easily pull from the evening news. It strips away any sense of genuine discovery, leaving the film feeling less like an investigative documentary and more like a carefully curated highlight reel.
Content-wise, the picture doesn't exactly challenge the viewer. At its core, it is essentially the leader of the Catholic Church telling existing Catholics how to pray, how to think, and how to live. There is very little critical friction or challenging inquiry here. I will concede that it serves as a fascinating historical curio; it is, after all, one of the very few films granted the unprecedented privilege of being shot inside the Vatican City. That access alone gives it a certain archival value, even if the filmmakers seem entirely unwilling to use that access to ask any genuinely tough questions.
This is clearly one of the most blatant pieces of "docuganda" I have ever encountered. It preaches exclusively to the converted, offering comfort rather than insight. While the visual polish is undeniable and the historical footprint is interesting, it completely lacks the journalistic rigour one would hope for from a filmmaker of this stature. It’s a harmless enough watch if you’re already a devout follower, but for anyone expecting a critical examination of the modern papacy, it remains a profoundly disappointing letdown.
The film sits in an odd space in Wenders' body of work: polished but unremarkable, historically curious but journalistically toothless. For viewers who come to it as admirers of the director rather than the subject, the disappointment is likely to feel sharpest. There is a broader conversation worth having about the ethics and aesthetics of authorised access documentary-making, about who gets to control the frame when the subject is also, in a meaningful sense, the co-producer. That conversation is more interesting than the film itself. Worth a look, perhaps, if only to understand what an extraordinary opportunity looked like when it was quietly set aside.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2026-07-15
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (2018) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
