The film “Lady of Guadalupe,” first released in 2020 and now available on many streaming services, mixes a fictional retelling of the 16th-century appearance of the Virgin Mary to a Mexican peasant named Juan Diego with the tale of a wholly fictional 21st-century reporter named Juan working on a story about miracles involving the Lady of Guadalupe.

As a researcher of religion, I’m interested in how religious history gets incorporated into contemporary faith and movies. It reminds me of the documentaries I watched as a child about the history of my own religious community: Mennonites who emigrated from Ukraine to Canada.

Religious communities, like the Mennonites and Mormons I have studied, can act in ways that may perplex people. As I contend in my forthcoming book about religion and film in Mexico, when films use religious symbols, experiences or figures, they make larger historical and social commentary. In Mexico, that often involves presenting critical views of Catholic priests as a way to comment on Mexican political leaders.

As I watched “Lady of Guadalupe,” I was curious to see how it might handle Catholicism’s role in the colonial period. Unfortunately, that aspect of the movie leaves a lot to be desired. Although it portrays the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe for a broad audience, ultimately this film sanitizes the real-life brutality of the Church toward Indigenous peoples in the 16th century.

The Virgin of Guadalupe in film history

Many filmmakers have been drawn to the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which is one of the earliest and most enduring Catholic miracle stories in the Americas. Juan Diego is said to have experienced a vision in 1531 of the Virgin Mary in Tepeyac, an area that is today the northern part of Mexico City.

Read:

https://theconversation.com/lady-of-guadalupe-avoids-tough-truths-about-the-catholic-church-and-indigenous-genocide-160079