The Vatican Filled In the Same Box as Everyone Else

There is a form every country's film office fills out once a year — one box for country of origin, one box for title, one box for running time — and until this September the box marked Vatican City had never been checked.

A forty-minute documentary called Green Lava, about a young Italian man and, as it happens, an active volcano, is what the Holy See is sending to the Academy this year, its first submission in the ninety-seven years the category has existed. I have not seen it and will not pretend to review a film I have not run through a projector, but the fact of the submission is its own small story, and it is the one I want to sit with tonight.

The category was built for exactly this kind of oddity — one film, one country, whatever that country's population or box office, standing in the same queue as everywhere else. Karnataka gives Anant Nag its highest honour this month in Kevadia, Busan doubles the size of a workshop for filmmakers nobody has heard of yet, and the Vatican, a state smaller than most film sets, submits a documentary through the identical bureaucratic door used by nations that release two thousand features a year. The paperwork does not care about scale. It asks the same three boxes of everyone.

That is the part of awards season nobody puts on a red carpet: a clerk somewhere in Rome, in an office that has never once needed a word for "distributor," working out how to fill in a form built for an industry the Vatican otherwise has no reason to touch. Somewhere in Los Angeles another clerk receives that form and files it beside submissions from nations with a century of studios behind them, and for one week in autumn a documentary about a volcano and a young man's faith is, on paper, exactly as real as the biggest release of the year.

I keep thinking about that box on the form, sitting empty for ninety-seven years, filled in for the first time this month by someone who had to look up how.