British distributors Arrow Films have officially announced that they will release on Blu-ray director Dietrich Brüggemann's film
Stations of the Cross (2014), starring Anna Brüggemann, Lucie Aron, Michael Kamp, and Franziska Weisz. The release will be available for purchase on January 19th.
14 year old Maria (Lea Van Acken) is a member of a strict branch of Catholicism that rejects all the reforms that were made in the Church since the 1960s. Maria lives her everyday life in the modern world, yet yearns to follow Jesus fully, to become a saint and go to heaven. Christian, a boy she meets at school, almost draws Maria away from her goal with an invite to join the school's gospel choir, but her strictly pious mother (Franziska Weiz) pulls her back in line, seeing his tentative approaches as a temptation to sin, along with participating in what she sees as the 'Devils music'.
Told in fourteen individual tableaus that parallel Christ's journey to his crucifixion, Stations of the Cross is both an indictment of fundamentalist faith and the articulation of an impressionable teen's struggle to find her own path in life.