Arianna’s Journey :
a pilgrimage of faith
Arianna’s Journey: a pilgrimage of faith (2007) is the story of a woman who has the gift of healing, and her travels in pursuit of her spiritual destiny. Arianna lives outside Milan in the small town of Novara, where she was born. Her husband Carlo runs his father’s grocery store.
Since she was 14, Arianna has emanated heat from her hands. Her mother reports that, “sometimes she could even burn you if you touched her”. Not accepting any payment for her healing, Arianna works on people from near and far by laying her hands on them: “I interact with the soul, not with the body. The body is suffering when the soul is suffering.” In the most extreme form of this kind of healing, Arianna performs an exorcism on a local woman who is suffering from severe psychological problems. She explains that “Satan is not the rival of God, but he is helping on this earth to highlight human sins […] though he frightened me at first, I’m not afraid of him now, because I know that evil always brings good”.
Since the age of 6 Arianna has believed that she will give birth to the next Christ-consciousness. She says that she has no free will, and acts only upon an inner compass, through which God directs her journey.
These inner directives take her to ancient sacred caves in the Pyrenees; peyote fields in the high Mexican desert; and holy shrines in Israel and Palestine. The film is a meditation on the sublime and the mundane aspects of a modern day pilgrimage of faith.
Digital Beta, color/sound, 30 minutes. 2007