Believing Women: Faith, Agency, and Peacebuilding in Contemporary Cinema

Contemporary cinema increasingly portrays believing women as active moral agents rather than passive figures confined by patriarchal or religious stereotypes. However, scholarship on religion and film has predominantly focused on male religious figures, leaving the representation of believing women comparatively underexplored, especially in films directed by women in the twenty-first century. This paper addresses this gap by examining how female agency, religious identity, and peacebuilding are represented in three contemporary films directed by women: Wadjda (2012, Saudi Arabia), God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya (2019, North Macedonia), and Women Talking (2022, USA). These films were selected because, despite originating from distinct religious and cultural contexts—Islam, Orthodox Christianity, and Protestant Mennonite tradition—they share female protagonists who negotiate patriarchal religious structures through nonviolent, relational strategies of action. Drawing on feminist film theory and the distinction between negative and positive peace, the analysis demonstrates that these protagonists move beyond stereotypical portrayals of religious women as passive or marginalized, instead enacting agency through persistence, dialogue, solidarity, and nonviolent resistance. The paper argues that contemporary women-directed cinema can function as a space for reimagining women’s religious identities and for articulating more inclusive, peace-oriented models of social transformation.