Interview: Sound of Freedom Director Alejandro Monteverde On Cabrini and the “faith-based” label

No one expected Sound of Freedom to make such a big splash at the North American box office last summer. Nevertheless, this long-shelved drama starring Jim Caviezel as Tim Ballard, the controversial head of Operation Underground Railroad, out-grossed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, as well as Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. But, the film wasn’t without controversy, with many online assuming it was somehow linked to QAnon, something the director Alejandro Monteverde denied, saying the goal of the movie was to expose child sex trafficking and that it was never intended to be a political film.

Now, Monteverde is back with perhaps an even more ambitious film, Cabrini, which is based on the life of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, the first American citizen ever to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church. To mark the film’s release, we sat down with Monteverde to discuss what drew him to the project. Interestingly, Monteverde somewhat takes issue with the “faith-based” label, arguing that movies such as Martin Scorsese’s Silence, which is also about catholicism, are never stigmatized by this label. He reveals that originally he sought to do something a little different after Sound of Freedom, but felt this story case him to a certain degree, with Scorsese himself having been linked to a different version of this project years ago. In this interesting interview he discusses that, along with he racial prejudice Italians faced int he late 19th/ early 20th century, and how he hope audiences react to the film.

Cabrini opens wide in theaters this Friday! For more about Sound of Freedom and the controversy surrounding it, check out this article.