Confession is Good the Soul and Good for the Audience
Confession. The term refers to the act of lightening one’s conscience through revealing personal information and regret. Whether or not it’s good for the soul is something investigated in a recently released filmed titled with this verb. The medium of film serves as its own type of confession, allowing us to witness the “reality” of the characters in a story. The 2019 release Confession unravels the motivation behind a number of gruesome murders committed by an unlikely suspect. Transmitting the events with intrigue and suspense is a fine art; one executed exceedingly well by the filmmakers of Confession, which includes editor “Lucia” Ziyang Wang. To elicit the proper pace and feel of a film like this requires a skilled editor. Luica worked closely with the director to manifest a slowly creeping feeling of dread which causes viewers to question right and wrong.
While most of us think that an editor’s work begins after filming, at least for Lucia this is highly incorrect. She joined the preproduction meetings with the director [Wenbo Si] and cinematographer to listen to the arrangement and composition plans, joining the conversation to offer her opinions as to whether the desired shots were truly workable. Proving the adage “an ounce of prevention…” Wang recalls, “We had a heated discussion while we were talking about a set of shots to portray the power change between the priest and the prisoner. In the beginning it seems like the priest has the ultimate power but after one particular beat, things reversed and we can see the prisoner is over him. For this sets of shots, we had at least three different solutions that seems workable and I helped them to kick out two of these because they wouldn’t work in editing. I also had a long conversation with the director about why the priest didn’t say anything; from that conversation I had a deeper understanding of the priest’s passive personality, which inspired me in many of the insert shots.” Scenarios like this prove that an editor like Lucia contributes vastly with foresight in manifesting the final shape of a film.
In the opening of the film, a priest has arrived in the cell of a prisoner to offer the sacrament of confession to a multiple murder perpetrator. Surprisingly, this is a young woman. Through their conversation, we learn that the woman’s father had been assaulting her for quite some time. Upon reaching her breaking point, she killed both her father and grandmother. A secondary reveal, and plot twist, comes when the exchange unearths the fact that the priest himself served near this woman’s residential area, knew the family for a long time, and was aware of the assaults.
Released March 18th, 2019 at the AltFF Alternative Film Festival in Toronto, Confession has already attracted a global audience of admirers at such events as the Rome Independent Prisma Awards, European Cinematography Awards, Global Film Festival Awards (where it received Best Drama Short and Best Editing), and others. Like conversation itself, this film proves that intelligent and exceptionally talented communicators can take even the most basic elements (in this case, a dialogue between two people) and produce something fascinating. Lucia Wang is the proxy for the audience, placing us in a vantage point that allows the intensity of every emotion and surprise to be maximized by her arrangement of the shots. Wang’s ability to make an audience feel that they are in the middle of the story is extraordinary. The message of Confession is congruent with the famous Edmund Burke quote which states, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
