"Procession" presents a radical new concept regarding the reasoning to craft a story: to create something, not about people, but for them. Greene offers cinema as a medium of therapy, a tool of processing, to 6 survivors of sexual assault at the hands of the catholic church with each crafting a short film about how they wanted their stories to be told and seen. In the wrong hands, such a delicate matter could have been a disaster but instead, Greene illustrates a devastating portrait of men who never quite healed. Men who are still fighting from sunrise to sundown to release the anchor that keeps them entrenched in their pasts. Greene achieves this feat through a number of avenues. First, is his intelligent and restrained decision to focus shots on how these events have racked the bodies of the survivors, second, was the score by Keegan Dewitt and Dabney Morris, which provides a lot of heavy lifting to the emotional gravity of the film, third, was how incredibly well-edited the short-films are with the rest of the documentary; side note, this can especially be felt in the final 10 incredibly moving minutes of the documentary. However, where Procession begins to falter is with the short-films presented by the survivors, which although clearly therapeutic, isn't the most effective cinematic tool due to their inexperienced quality. Many times they will take you out of the documentary altogether but on the other hand, the project wouldn't be possible without the shorts so it's a catch-22. All in all, Greene has made a riveting documentary that even with its short-comings is still incredibly effective but more importantly, and perhaps impressively, has made the lives of 6 men all the better for it.
