Fides

Fides unfurls like a trembling candle in a cathedral at dusk: a mosaic of electroencephalograms, tear-streaked faces, and the hush of hospital corridors where heart monitors sync with whispered psalms. Archival 16 mm footage of 1970s neurosurgery dissolves into iPhone clips of a Lagos boy whose malignant lymphoma retreats after nightly Igbo chants; white-coated researchers in Basel argue over p-values while a mother in Oaxaca smuggles consecrated hosts into ICU feeding tubes. The film’s spine is not argument but echo—an echo that ricochets from double-blind prayer studies at Duke to a Texan prison where lifers map the amygdala’s glow when someone, somewhere, utters their names before an unseen deity. Oscilloscopic prayer waves ripple across the screen like auroras; subtitles translate both Latin liturgy and the Morse-like firing of neurons, until language itself surrenders to the susurrus of ventilators and the metallic Amen of MRI coils. In the final reel, the camera lingers on an empty chapel at 3 a.m., its crucifix a negative-space silhouette against sodium streetlight, while on the soundtrack a statistician confesses that the only variable left unaccounted for is wonder.