
Hand of God
Paul Cultrera grows up in Salem, Massachusetts, in the mid-1960s, molested by parish priest Father Joseph Birmingham. He keeps the abuse to himself for decades, telling his family only years after Birmingham has died. His brother, filmmaker Joe Cultrera, turns the camera on Paul as he finally talks through the anger and depression that followed him into adulthood, then widens the film into an investigation of Birmingham's other victims. What emerges is a pattern: repeated abuse complaints against the same priest, passed along a chain of church officials who reassigned him from parish to parish instead of stopping him. The film stays close to one Massachusetts family's account rather than a wide survey, using home movies and Paul's own testimony to show what the abuse cost him and how long it took to speak about it. The brothers' collaboration, one as subject and one as director, gives the film its unusual intimacy, and the church's documented pattern of reassignment gives it its case.