Project Modesty (2018)

Project Modesty, co-created with Ieva Lygnugarytė in 2018, examines the rhetoric used to describe “the flesh” in American Protestant churches. The film seeks to capture the tension between the physical body and the spirit, the inevitability of human weakness, and the fight to be virtuous and good.

Using sermonic text and eucharistic imagery (bread and wine), this film interrogates the meanings of indulgence, abstinence, truth, and denial. Project Modesty considers a new trinitarian relationship: the human body’s precondition to thirst, hunger, and lust, the human ego’s condition to dissatisfaction in the self and other, and therefore, the yearning for salvation by a god, calling us to be greater and holier than our after-Eden nature.