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Through contrasting depictions of belief under duress, Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here (2024) and Dustin Lance Black’s Under the Banner of Heaven (2022) interrogate the fragile boundary between faith as moral resistance and faith as moral weapon. Where Salles’s Brazil-set drama situates spiritual endurance within political repression, Black’s American miniseries dissects the corrosive psychology of revelation turned radical. Both works use craft — point of view, score, and geography — to transform faith from abstract theme to lived tension, revealing how devotion, when tested by power, becomes a study in both survival and collapse.

Faith in Context: The Cinematic Grammar of Belief Under Strain

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Across film history, faith has oscillated between transcendence and terror. From Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc to Scorsese’s Silence, cinema has long wrestled with the intersection of spiritual conviction and human cruelty. In I’m Still Here and Under the Banner of Heaven, this tradition takes on distinct modern inflections.

Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here reimagines the story of Eunice Paiva, a woman whose faith sustains her through Brazil’s military dictatorship of the 1970s. Dustin Lance Black’s Under the Banner of Heaven, adapted from Jon Krakauer’s 2003 nonfiction account of the Lafferty murders, explores how faith, when distorted by patriarchal zeal and prophetic absolutism, can lead to violence.

Though separated by geography and theology, both narratives unfold within closed systems — one political, one religious — each enforcing obedience in the name of purity. Salles and Black expose the same paradox: faith that resists power can become revolutionary, but faith that merges with power can become tyranny.

Walter Salles and the Spiritual Geometry of Resistance

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Salles’s I’m Still Here situates its protagonist, Eunice Paiva (played with restrained force by Fernanda Torres), in a world where faith becomes both refuge and rebellion. When her husband Rubens, a lawyer and dissident, is abducted by the regime, Eunice’s Catholic devotion transforms from ritual to resistance.

The film’s visual language is unmistakably Salles: patient, tactile, humane. His handheld camera stays tethered to Eunice’s subjectivity, rarely breaking the domestic confines of her home or the bureaucratic corridors where she pleads for information. This tethering constitutes a theological choice. Faith, in Salles’s lens, is embodied — it exists in gesture and endurance, not in proclamation.

The production’s location work enhances this intimacy. Shot on location in São Paulo and Brasília, the film blurs public and private space through its use of architecture: wide, state-built concrete corridors dwarf the individual, while domestic interiors glow with candlelight and shadow. The mise-en-scène evokes the tension between spiritual interiority and political exteriority.

Salles and cinematographer Adrian Teijido employ a subdued color palette — muted ochres and silvers — that recalls the faded tones of 1970s photojournalism. This aesthetic restraint mirrors Eunice’s quiet defiance. Even the score, composed by Warren Ellis, avoids melodrama. Sparse piano motifs and choral hums replace overt orchestration, echoing Catholic lamentation but emptied of grandeur. The effect is devotional minimalism: grief becomes liturgy.

In I’m Still Here, Salles articulates belief as an act of witnessing. Faith is not triumphal but testimonial — a record of endurance against the machinery of silence. When Eunice lights a candle in an empty church, the scene plays not as religiosity but as cinematic confession: the private ritual becomes a public plea.

Dustin Lance Black and the American Theology of Violence

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By contrast, Under the Banner of Heaven explores faith’s mutation under isolation and fear. Set in 1984 Utah, the series examines a double murder committed by Mormon fundamentalists who claimed divine sanction. Yet Black’s true subject is not the killers but the erosion of faith in those who remain.

Detective Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield), a devout Latter-day Saint, becomes the series’ moral lens. As he investigates, his faith corrodes — not through disbelief, but through doubt’s necessity. Black’s direction (alongside episodic directors David Mackenzie and Courtney Hunt) frames this unraveling through an aesthetic of interior suffocation: dim lamplight, long silences, and the near-constant presence of prayer that ceases to comfort.

Filmed in Calgary standing in for Utah, the location work transforms the supposed heartland of American religiosity into an existential desert. The pale landscapes — washed blues and whites — evoke spiritual sterility rather than transcendence. Production designer Renée Read crafts homes that feel both sacred and airless: the geometry of order masking moral entropy.

The series’ score by Jeff Ament and Phil Ek underlines this disquiet. Where Salles’s music mourns, Black’s distorts — turning hymn-like harmonies into dissonance. The effect recalls The Exorcist’s subversion of sacred sound, but here the horror is not demonic possession but ideological certainty.

The camera often mirrors Pyre’s moral disorientation. In interrogation scenes, the lens drifts between focus and blur, suggesting the unstable ground between testimony and revelation. The editing (Dirk Westervelt, Matthew Hannam) collapses timelines, juxtaposing Pyre’s investigation with flashbacks to early Mormon history, including the massacre at Mountain Meadows. This temporal layering visualizes how extremism is not born in isolation but inheres in historical repetition.

Point of View: Two Witnesses of Faith

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Eunice Paiva and Jeb Pyre inhabit opposite ends of faith’s spectrum — one secularized by politics, the other sanctified by religion — yet both serve as cinematic witnesses. Salles’s Eunice perceives the world through steadfast moral conviction, while Black’s Pyre perceives it through disintegrating certainty.

In I’m Still Here, Salles limits our knowledge to Eunice’s own. The spectator learns the truth of her husband’s disappearance only as she does, producing a kind of epistemological faith: we must believe without proof. This restricted narration mirrors the reality of authoritarian repression, where truth itself is contraband.

In Under the Banner of Heaven, the point of view reverses. Pyre begins within the safety of institutional belief and ends exiled from it. The audience follows his crisis not as spectators of injustice but as co-participants in disillusionment. His slow recognition that faith can justify atrocity transforms the procedural format into theological inquiry.

Both characters are defined by moral solitude. For Eunice, solitude is imposed; for Pyre, it is chosen. She keeps her faith because she must; he loses his because he cannot reconcile it with truth. Together, they form an implicit dialogue on belief’s elasticity — the degree to which faith bends before it breaks.

Score and Tone: Sound as Spiritual Text

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In both works, music functions as theology.

Salles’s I’m Still Here uses silence and restraint to evoke sacred realism. The score enters only at emotional thresholds — letters received, candles lit, voices silenced. Each note carries the weight of prayer. The film’s auditory minimalism recalls Bresson’s ascetic style, where grace is conveyed through absence rather than spectacle.

Black’s Banner, by contrast, treats the score as contamination. Choral harmonies curdle into drones, invoking the unease of faith warped by fanaticism. The auditory palette blends hymnals with electronic undertones, collapsing the sacred and the profane. The effect is psychological: we hear belief decaying in real time.

The tonal contrast underscores the films’ ethical positions. Salles elevates faith as resistance; Black interrogates it as pathology. Yet both use sound to insist that belief is felt before it is understood.

Location as Theology

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Cinema often externalizes inner conflict through geography. In these two works, location becomes a spiritual map.

Salles grounds I’m Still Here in the textures of Brazil’s urban architecture — concrete, humidity, candle smoke. The regime’s physical structures embody the rigidity of state power, while the domestic spaces radiate fragility and warmth. The camera lingers on the faces of mothers and widows, treating them as saints of the everyday. The city becomes a cathedral of endurance.

Black’s Under the Banner of Heaven, shot in the Canadian Rockies, translates religious extremism into topography. The endless flatness of suburban streets mirrors the sameness of thought within the community, while the encroaching mountains evoke the weight of divine omnipresence. The geography enforces conformity; isolation breeds revelation.

Both directors use light as theological argument. Salles bathes Eunice in warm naturalism, suggesting faith as illumination amid darkness. Black submerges Pyre in chiaroscuro, where light exposes rather than redeems. In both, illumination becomes dialectical — revealing truth while amplifying doubt.

Systems of Control: Political vs. Religious Orthodoxy

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At their cores, both I’m Still Here and Under the Banner of Heaven confront the same question: how do institutions weaponize belief?

Salles’s Brazil is a state masquerading as church, demanding faith in authority and obedience to silence. The military dictatorship uses ideology the way religion uses dogma — to legitimize control. Eunice’s insistence on truth becomes a heresy against the state’s gospel of order.

Black’s Utah is a church masquerading as state, where patriarchal authority governs with equal absoluteness. The Lafferty brothers’ radicalism, though fringe, emerges from within the logic of obedience. Revelation replaces law; the household becomes the site of divine government.

Both systems depend on moral absolutism. In I’m Still Here, doubt is punished because it threatens the illusion of unity; in Banner, doubt is feared because it undermines divine certainty. The results converge: women are silenced, violence is justified, and faith becomes indistinguishable from fear.

Cinematic Traditions: From Political Cinema to American Gothic

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Salles’s film situates itself within Latin America’s long tradition of political cinema — from Tomás Gutiérrez Alea to Glauber Rocha — where the personal is inherently political. His realism is ethical, not stylistic: to witness is to resist. The camera’s intimacy asserts a moral stance against dehumanization.

Black’s Banner participates in the American Gothic lineage of moral investigation, sharing DNA with True Detective and In Cold Blood. It dissects the underside of frontier myth: the collision between divine destiny and human corruption. By merging the true-crime genre with theological introspection, Black reclaims procedural storytelling as a critique of theocratic America.

Both works extend their national cinematic languages. Salles transforms Brazil’s collective memory of dictatorship into a meditation on grace; Black translates the mythology of Mormon purity into an allegory of decay.

Faith’s Double Edge: Endurance and Extremism

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If Salles’s Eunice represents faith as endurance, Black’s Pyre represents faith as crisis. Yet both expose the same moral structure: belief functions as an interpretive system for suffering. The difference lies in whether that system resists or reinforces power.

In I’m Still Here, belief offers agency — it allows Eunice to assert meaning in the face of state erasure. In Banner, belief becomes bondage — it traps Pyre in a moral labyrinth where divine will and human ethics diverge.

Both films end on gestures of ambiguity. Salles closes with Eunice’s quiet persistence: her husband’s fate remains uncertain, but her moral clarity endures. Black concludes with Pyre’s tentative emancipation: he walks into the snow, stripped of certainty but free of illusion. In each, salvation lies not in revelation but in conscience.

The Cost of Conviction

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I’m Still Here and Under the Banner of Heaven articulate the two poles of faith under pressure — one where belief confronts injustice, the other where it becomes complicit in it. Salles’s Brazil and Black’s Utah may seem worlds apart, yet both reveal belief’s capacity to both heal and harm.

Each director understands that faith, when confronted by power, ceases to be abstract. It becomes a lived aesthetic — embodied in sound, light, and moral perspective. For Eunice Paiva, faith is an act of memory; for Jeb Pyre, it is an act of unlearning.

Together, they form a dialectic: faith as endurance, faith as extremism. Between them lies the fragile hope that belief, when tempered by doubt, can remain human.

Key Takeaways — Faith Under Pressure

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• Faith as Resistance vs. Faith as Control: Salles portrays faith as moral resistance to political repression; Black portrays it as moral corrosion within religious absolutism.
• Craft as Theology: Point-of-view restriction, score composition, and lighting serve as visual languages of belief, transforming internal crises into cinematic tension.
• Location as Metaphor: Brazil’s humid confinement and Utah’s frozen isolation mirror the moral climates of their respective systems.
• Moral Witnessing: Both Eunice Paiva and Jeb Pyre act as witnesses — one preserving faith against power, the other unraveling it under the weight of revelation.
• Faith’s Fragility: When belief merges with authority, it risks becoming indistinguishable from tyranny.