Five Throughout the World

Five Children, Their Families and Their Faith

Award-Winning Short **VIDEO**

Skippy Massey
Humboldt Sentinel

There’s nothing quite like the open, trusting faith of a child.

Five children, five religions, and in almost five minutes, this film takes us from the mundane to the sublime, from the chaotic to the peaceful, and for a moment to our beliefs about our spiritual commonality across the planet.

In the short film “Five,” director Katina Mercadante follows five 5-year-olds as they get ready, leave home and attend prayer services.  We see the children, who live around the world, carefully pull on their best clothes, wash up, have breakfast and travel with their parents to their respective houses of worship.

The children come from vastly different religious and cultural backgrounds — Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian.

But when they reach their destinations, settle into stillness and close their eyes for prayer, the similarities are striking.

Mercadante, a 30-year-old filmmaker from San Francisco, told The Huffington Post that it was these poignant moments of spiritual reflection that she was trying to capture with her piece.

She set out to find children who already had a strong prayer life.  Because of their age, she said, all the kids she worked with seemed to have a simple and pure faith.  They weren’t jaded or cynical about prayer — they simply saw it as a way to talk to God.

Katina and her husband, Daniel, make films that celebrate life.  Katina grew up in a Hindu tradition that teaches that all religions hold aspects of the divine.  She said she feels that this upbringing gave her the ability to find beauty in many different religious traditions– and she wants others to see that, as well.

“Life isn’t just about money or possessions,” Mercadante said. 

“There is an internal and spiritual life that we all have that is a really important part of being a human and existing.  And it doesn’t matter where you get that from.”

~Via the Huffington Post and Carol Kuruvilla, The Mercadantes, and Vimeo

  This one is for Karen.