Procession: The role of screenwriting and filmmaking in the healing process of survivors

This article discusses the therapeutic potential of scriptwriting in healing trauma behind and in front of the screen. It focuses on the documentary Procession (Greene 2021) that gives voice to six middle-aged male survivors of child abuse by Catholic priests. The documentary shows film director, Robert Greene, and the dramatherapist, Monica Phinney, leading a journey of continually supporting and encouraging survivors to re-tell their stories. Rather than focusing on direct interviews, Procession invites survivors to re-enact their memories, creating an opportunity for them to not only revisit but also to recover from their personal traumas. As they share their stories, they engage in a collective act of screenwriting, taking turns acting in each other’s scenes. The documentary shows the complex process of screenwriting to overcome child abuse and trauma, as each survivor creates and shoots a key scene from their personal history of abuse. Throughout the documentary, survivors play the roles of screenwriters, film directors and actors, leading their scenes, bringing traumatic dialogues back to life, recalling nightmares and revisiting physical sites of abuse. This article draws upon Bill Nichols’s and Jill Godmilow’s analytical framework of performance-based documentary to analyse how Procession uses scriptwriting and filmmaking as tools for participants to unpack their feelings, generating space for a cathartic reconciliation with their past.