Tessa Strain in Revelations of Divine Love Since watching Revelations of Divine Love—which is making its world premiere at FIDMarseille today—I’ve found myself thinking about its construction, restraint, devotion to form and alarming sincerity. Brimming with the mystery of manifestation, it is a work of sheer will, equal parts spiritual inquiry and cinematic lament. Masterfully lensed by cinematographer Gabe Elder, the light surrounding our heroine, Julian of Norwich (Tessa Strain), is diffused and precise, its textures tangible. I reached out to Caroline Golum because I found myself curious: not just about the film itself, but about her process, commitment, and rigor that shaped it. The film draws from the writing of Julian, a 14th-century mystic who, after falling ill and experiencing divine visions of Christ’s crucifixion, chose to enclose herself in a small room for the rest of her life to write and pray as an anchoress. The film is about the survival of an artist’s spirit and through its movements it becomes a kind of mirror: sincere, strange, detailed and hand-stiched. More than anything the work asks the question: how do we know that we’re enough?
Our interview closes with a tarot pull. Unsurprisingly, there is death but the promise of release lives on the horizon. The worst has happened, and still, we rise. After all, as Julian once said: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Here Caroline speaks of disappearing into the void to make films forever. Maybe it’s that same solitude and humble dedication that most closely aligns her with the divine conversation Julian was also attempting to grasp.
Bohdanowicz: In Revelations of Divine Love we’re working with a world that is hand-molded and tailored. The book it’s based on is essentially an epic monologue of intuited divine experience, an exegesis. To reanimate it the way you did is singular. The film is a carousel of empathy: Julian towards Jesus, and you towards Julian. It’s serene, sincere, reciprocal. That sincerity is what holds the film together.
Golum: The people who’ve seen it seem surprised by that. Our running joke—though it’s not really a joke—was that biblical films in the Hollywood canon were often made by Jews, Communists and queer people, and what was our crew if not that? What I loved—and what I wanted the film to invite the audience to believe—is that what happened to Julian was real. Nowadays we frame spiritual experience through a lens of mental illness. We retroactively psychoanalyze. But for Julian, in her time these visions were part of everyday life. You could be a layperson, have a discourse with the divine and it would be taken seriously. She chose to write about it, and in English, so people could understand. That’s huge. She wrote in the vernacular, like Chaucer, which tells us she wanted the common person to read it. That everydayness is essential. It speaks to how the divine can live in the ordinary.
Bohdanowicz: That modesty and humility is what allows the divine to rise in the film. It’s disarming. There’s a real parallel between Julian removing herself from the world to commune with God and the act of making a film.
Golum: No shit, dude. I know it.
Bohdanowicz: Throughout Julian’s isolation period there’s the character of Julian’s friend who arrives at the window, offering support, goods and commentary intermittently. That felt like a metaphor for filmmaking: how we retreat from the world to realize a vision both with the help, and sometimes the disruption, of others.
Golum: Totally. The only part of this film I can claim sole authorship over is the idea to make it. It was a years-long process, and other people were involved at every stage. It’s about being moved by something profound and choosing to retreat to realize it. But then you ask: how alone can you really be? How long can you afford to be? What do you owe your community? Because no film is made in a vacuum. There are great directors who are the sole authors of their work. I’m not that. The film exists because of many people’s expertise. So I had to ask: what do I owe myself as the person driven to make it, and what do I owe everyone else? How can I make the process nourishing for others, too, even when we have so little?
Bohdanowicz: And you were making it during a time of collective and global upheaval.
Golum: Exactly. The film became a mirror. It started personal, stopped being personal, then became personal again. The pandemic shaped the rewrites. I was working on the script during lockdown and saw a chance to connect Julian’s context with mine. I’d read about the plague, but then I was living it. I’d participated in activism, but I’d never seen a pandemic followed by a popular uprising. That’s how it unfolded historically—Julian’s book has the plague first, then the uprising. There were little things, like asking our sound designer to insert tolling bells in the plague scenes. In New York, we heard ambulance sirens every 15 minutes. That’s seared into me.
Sometimes I dream of locking myself in a room and just making movies forever. I did that for five weeks. It was great. But you have to return to your collaborators, to the world. The desire to make the work stems from wanting to return to that visionary space.
Bohdanowicz: I really felt your reach for the personal and familiar and everyday with the cameos that you had. For example, Dan Sallitt or Inney Prakash.
Golum: That was out of necessity. Our original actor dropped out, so I called Dan. A lot of the cast were filmmakers or cinephiles I know. We were a small outfit, low budget, so we relied on people who understood set culture. Folks like Jodie Mack—she makes very different films from mine, but she gets what it means to focus, to disappear into a project. It made my job easier because I could speak in a shared language. It’s always more fun making movies with friends. Julian couldn’t be an anchoress without a community around her. Historically, a hermit attached to your church meant your parish had favor. People invested in that. It made their worship site feel special. They wanted her work—through prayer or writing—to reflect back on them. I feel the same way about the people in my film. I owe it to them to make something they can be proud of.
Bohdanowicz: I’m curious to hear more about the choice to make a film that holds space for spiritual sincerity. There’s no irony in your approach. It feels refreshing in that way.
Golum: I think that sincerity is possible because most of us weren’t raised Christian. I came to Christianity as an outsider. Julian’s writing was completely unlike the evangelical fascism I grew up seeing in America. That version is exclusionary and weaponized. But the teachings of Christ—and Julian’s writing—felt more in line with the Jewish moral framework I was raised in: to alleviate suffering, to do good work.
Because I didn’t grow up in church, I didn’t carry baggage. I could select what resonated with me, ethically and spiritually. The film hinges on whether or not you take Julian at her word. I’m not interested in portraying medieval society as backward. Part of the motivation for this film was to correct our misconceptions, especially about medieval women. We act like the Middle Ages were a cultural dead zone, then the Renaissance “rescued” us with classical ideas. But that story’s not true. There was rich thought, art and spiritual life in the 14th century. If someone watches this film, then goes home and Googles the Middle Ages with new curiosity, I’ve done my job. Christianity isn’t inherently colonial or bigoted. Those traits were grafted onto it by colonizers. It’s a beautiful tradition, and there’s still a lot it can offer. And don’t forget, Jesus Christ was Jewish. We both went to Sanders, as it were.
Bohdanowicz: Speaking of Christ. I loved how sensual he is in the film. During her visions, he hovers over Julian’s bed in such a charged, romantic way. It’s hot. I was thinking of sculptures in the Louvre—the saints in ecstasy. It’s orgasmic. I was talking to someone today about Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss.
Golum: Oh, which I was also reading about because I play this Wikipedia guessing game called Catfishing. One of the clues yesterday was that sculpture. It’s all connected.
I remember gazing at this sculpture. It was romantic, sensual. We don’t associate sensuality with medieval art, but it’s there. Medieval art was meant to be read as much as looked at, and Julian draws from that—she writes about Jesus as her mother who nurses believers. Christ’s side wound is often depicted as a vaginal opening, even a birth canal, emphasizing the life-giving nature of blood. That sensuality is already baked into the iconography.
I wanted people to love this Christ, so I cast someone beautiful who looked like a Fayum mummy portrait. These are painted sarcophagus portraits from the early Common Era—Egypt, Palestine, Greece. If you were from Nazareth, you likely looked like that. And I needed someone magnetic. He’s limited by art-historical poses, but like Falconetti in Joan of Arc, he pushes emotion through the smallest gestures. I wanted audiences to feel why Julian was moved: it’s love. Christ gives his body to cleanse us from sin. How do we match that love? We receive it and try to replicate it.
Bohdanowicz: That’s such a compelling way to frame it. But I wonder: this is a film about a woman, Julian, yet her spiritual awakening is mediated through a man’s suffering. Did that tension matter to you?
Golum: It’s a fair question. There’s a humanist tendency in medieval writing that predates the Renaissance. Christ, though divine, is a man like any other. He’s a carpenter’s son, born in occupied Palestine, executed for a political belief: that no one is better than anyone else, and all are worthy of love and forgiveness.
Medieval people lived under feudal, economic and domestic systems of oppression. They saw Christ’s and Mary’s suffering as mirrors of their own. His pain is holy because it’s sacrificial. He nurtures, feeds, consoles. Julian writes of him in maternal terms. Likewise, the Virgin Mary gives women a divine figure whose sacrifice mirrors their own. That scene between Julian and her mother, and then later with Sybil who’s lost her family—both times Julian invokes the Virgin: “She suffered for every mother on earth.” These figures weren’t remote. They were beloved because they had suffered too.
I have something to say about every frame of this movie, it took me eight years.
Bohdanowicz: It shows. During that time, did you ever have to betray the text to find something more cinematic?
Golum: Constantly. The script evolved daily. We chose moments from Julian’s writing that felt visual: Christ as a gardener, or his first appearance on her deathbed. Julian’s expanded text is deeply theological, hard to depict, expansive, and much of it is difficult to translate cinematically, especially the deeper theology she spent years developing. So, we distilled what could be rendered on screen and encouraged people to read the book. It’s always better than the movie. We also leaned heavily on art history. We had a studio library of medieval references.
Bohdanowicz: I felt a great deal of your visual language coming from paintings from Piero della Francesca, Vermeer, de la Roche.
Golum: We wanted light, dust, chiaroscuro. I hate how medieval films often default to “everything is dirty.” Sure, there wasn’t running water, but people still had hygiene. The Middle Ages were rich in art, literature, craftsmanship. We wanted to reflect that. My secret weapons were Gabe Elder [cinematographer] and Grant Stoops [art director]. Gabe brought texture with lasers and dust, and Grant, a painter, worked in the visual language of the old masters. We all—me, Gabe, Grant, Kate Stahl [producer], Sydney Bouchon [AD]—took on the production design credit. We joked we were the “cops of trees” after a line in the script. It was very DIY, very joyful. We shot in Ridgewood, Queens, not Europe, with a bunch of New York dirtbags. The joy of building something from scratch was part of the film’s essence.
Bohdanowicz: I noticed there’s a scene where the shutter in Julian’s cell is caked in rain and mud.
Golum: That specificity came from our love of history. We studied Norwich’s stone, architectural quirks, medieval manuscripts. Grant Stoops even painted backdrops for our model shots based on illuminated texts. The green shutter? I just like green.
Bohdanowicz: In watching it I thought of films like Camille Claudel, The Passion of Joan of Arc, even The Princess Bride.
Golum: Okay, I hate The Princess Bride! But I get it—the Middle Ages have always been the West’s fantasy playground. I love wizards, saints, knights. But our references leaned toward medieval art films that use anachronism with purpose: Jarman’s Caravaggio, Russell’s The Devils, Blanche, even Andy Milligan’s Guru the Mad Monk. Jarman, especially, helped me see how to balance evocation with recreation. A historical film is always about two eras: the one it portrays, and the one it’s made in. We weren’t aiming for perfect accuracy—we couldn’t. But we could make a world that felt intentional, handmade, specific. That’s what mattered.
Bohdanowicz: You did a lot with very little. The sound design is especially rich—suggesting an entire world with voices, bells, ambient textures. How did you build that?
Golum: The sound was the most fun in post. Wren Stark Haven, our designer, is brilliant. She understands that sound creates a whole parallel narrative—it augments and sometimes overrides what’s onscreen. We’d sit in her Ridgewood studio and talk about what the church meant back then. I described it as being like the internet: a real place that exerts influence everywhere. She understood that. She’s also a gamer, so she brought that medieval-fantasy sensibility too. We built a bigger world than we could afford to show.
Bohdanowicz: It really supported Tessa’s performance, which is so internal and focused. She truly lives in a tunnel of energy. How did you direct her and cultivate that stillness?
Golum: The set helped. We built her in, so she was physically confined. Wardrobe added to it. I’ve known Tessa since third grade. I wrote this for her. She’s trained, we’ve worked together before. She’s totally different in real life: funny and sarcastic. But the role, her solitude, the physical limits—that all helped her channel this quiet power. Some of the cast were first-time actors, others filmmakers or old friends. I try to tell actors what the scene needs, then let them go—I have enough to worry about. With Tessa, we talked through things but ultimately it was her job, and she nailed it. Casting is 90% of directing. She’s stunning. Big eyes, dynamic face, no bad angles. She’s always had a commanding presence. I didn’t have to direct that.
Bohdanowicz: The costumes were remarkable. Can you talk about Nell Simon and what her work entailed?
Golum: I know what I like and what I want but I’m not an expert in everything. That’s why you bring in experts, and Nell is the best costume designer in North America. She studied historical fashion and is also a great seamstress. I didn’t know about her background when we first talked about the film. Once I found out, it was obvious: she was a natural fit. I had color palettes in mind, drawn from the art of the era, and some historical fashion books. But Nell went way beyond that. She bought a book of historical costume patterns, made garments to order and dressed the entire ensemble. We talked about seasonality, how medieval life was deeply tied to the rhythm of the year and about using fabrics and textures to convey class. The way characters dress tells you who they are: the pilgrims, the peasantry, Julian’s mother, the priests. I wanted strong contrasts—between a wealthy court priest and a parish priest devoted to his flock, between a noblewoman arriving in silks and Julian, in her little room, focused on her work.
Bohdanowicz: I want to bring it back to the text for a moment. I loved the scene with the sister where in a moment of crisis she asks the priest, “How do we know that we’re enough?”
Golum: How do I know that my work is enough? You don’t know. That’s the problem.
Bohdanowicz: I loved the priest’s answer. He states how the Lord holds the hazelnut, the way he holds us all.
Golum: That’s straight from Julian. I wanted a scene where people are using her words to comfort one another. Not just to show her influence beyond the anchorhold, but to convey why her work is important to me.
Bohdanowicz: Because it’s a source of comfort?
Golum: Yes. She writes from frailty. Political turmoil, spiritual anguish, physical sickness. She writes from the margins, so others can understand it. I wanted someone to find comfort in her words. That scene with Sister Ramirez—she undergoes the most growth in the film. She’s an avatar for the audience: skeptical of Julian, self-absorbed, feeling superior. But she’s laid low by the plague. Surrounded by death, she’s no longer just folding laundry and hanging out with the girls. She’s in it.
If you’ve been spiritually or politically sheltered, confronting real suffering does a number on you. I wanted to show someone like that encountering Julian’s text and being moved. Because that’s what Julian did—she was reduced to nothing, and still reached for meaning. You don’t know if your work is enough. But maybe if you believe you are loved and kept, for no reason, you can begin to love others the same way.
Bohdanowicz: These ideologies are so relevant now.
Golum: Yeah. I think of this film as a release valve for my frustration with what Christianity claims to be versus how it’s practiced—especially in the U.S. America calls itself a Christian country, but its actions contradict that constantly. I grew up Reform Jewish, which borrows from the Episcopal tradition. At Passover we say, “You too were strangers in Egypt.” We are diasporic people. We’re strangers wherever we go. It doesn’t matter if others love us, we owe it to the world to respond with love.
Bohdanowicz: That really comes through in the film. People are constantly challenged and respond with love, even against their instincts.
Golum: If that’s what people take away, then great. And if all they take away is that you can make a medieval period piece for under $200,000, then also great. Both can be true.
Bohdanowicz: Beautifully said. I was thinking we could end with a tarot pull. If Julian were a card, you’d said she’d be the Hermit. But let’s ask: What is the film?
Carline: Sure.
Sofia pulls a card.
Bohdanowicz: Ten of Swords.
Golum: That makes perfect sense. I love the Ten of Swords. The Suit of Swords is vexing—it’s about the mind playing tricks on you. But the Ten is a conclusion. You’ve hit bottom. You’re laid low. You have to undergo ego death before you can rise again. Julian is literally bedridden, on the brink of death. She wanted to understand Christ’s suffering. That’s what the Ten of Swords is: plumbing the darkest parts of yourself, enduring the pain, and coming out the other side. Christ cries out, “Why have you forsaken me?” He’s betrayed, reduced. But after that: rebirth. For Julian too. The film, in that way, is about despair but also what happens next.