The Shroud: Face to Face

This movie follows a selfish and uneducated man, Bobby "Sunday Drive" Orlando, who only seeks to display his own disjointed journey to "discover" the Shroud. It's obvious that he tries to encourage others to learn about the shroud through his own learning, but it just does not work.

His "attempt" at education is marred by pretentious rambles, childish cutscenes, and inappropriate reenactments of Christ's passion. It is all about him and has nothing to do with it's title; the most studied artifact in the world, the mirror of the gospels, the most beautiful representation of faith and science, the Shroud of Turin.

The Shroud is absolutely fascinating, and I appreciate the information that was displayed in the film. The speakers and analysts they had were extremely helpful, as was the discussion of evidence.

The production, and everything about the producer, was utterly terrible. He somehow found a way to make it about him. There are multiple cutscenes of him driving his convertible Porsche (?) with big sunglasses on, for absolutely no reason. In one long section of the film, he carries a small cross maybe a couple hundred feet with shoes and clothes on, talking about how much he struggled. It is INSANELY disrespectful. What Christ went through is not even in the same realm as this, and to act like you're suffering AT ALL is BLASPHEMOUS. You should be ashamed of yourself. This should've been a documentary focusing on JESUS, not you.

The Shroud Face to Face by Robert Orlando, 2024.

We can applaud the time taken by the producer to travel to several cities in the world to film the real locations related to the Shroud. However, the French part was completely missing.

There are some nice graphical presentations by superposing different images of various locations and times. That makes the film dreamy like where we can imagine more than what these locations represent.

The historical presentation of the Shroud has many shortcomings. There was plenty of time in the film to present more details of its history, for example, by its arrival in Lirey and the life of Geoffroy de Charny, the first known owner of the Shroud in France.

The Shroud arrived in Chambéry in 1453, not in 1537 as shown on the map displayed in the film. That map did not even mention that the Shroud was first exhibited in the village of Lirey, a major historical fact of the Shroud, but only a very general "France."

There is mention of the Shroud image as a "negative." However, there is no mention of its 3D characteristic, which is the real nature of the image and its most important one, which shows that the image most likely comes from a real body. The "negativity" comes from its 3D characteristic, because it recorded the distance of the cloth to the body. The closer the cloth was to the body, the darker it is on the cloth. We better perceive the image as a 3D body by looking at the negative image of the Shroud. The "negativity" did not produce the 3D effect, it is the other way around.

It was mentioned by one of the experts that a bishop, which was Pierre D'Arcis but not named in the film, had found an artist claiming to have painted the Shroud. This is not what was written by Pierre D'Arcis wrote in 1389: he wrote that his predecessor, Henri de Poitiers who had passed way, had found an artist claiming that the Shroud could have been painted. Also, D'Arcis did not mention any document on which he based his statement. He appears to base his claim on hearsay of events 34 years before he writes, or he may simply have made it up. That completely changes the claim of that Bishop regarding the supposed inauthenticity of the Shroud that would have been discovered. And in fact, the Shroud is not a painting at all as proven in the 20th century.

Another expert claims many reasons that would have affected the radiocarbon dating of 1988, but none of them are believable. For example, the Poor Claire nuns in Chambéry could not have used invisible mending on the Shroud to repair it after the fire of 1532 in the chapel of Chambéry, because they used very simple techniques such as large patches to reinforce the Shroud. The area of the sample of the 1988 radiocarbon dating did not need any mending from the fire of 1532. There is also no evidence that the fire of Chambéry may have affected the radiocarbon dating. All these claims have been spread by authors not having the appropriate knowledge of history and radiocarbon dating. There might be something else that has affected the radiocarbon dating, but these reasons cannot be one of them.

In many scenes we do not know where we are, or what an object is. We appear to be at the Shroud Museum of Turin at some point, but this is not mentioned. An open coffer is shown. It was used for what and when? At some point we are in Turin, in a small chapel, but it is not mentioned which it is (it appears to be at the Holy Chapel of the Shroud near the Museum of the Shroud). When Robert Orlando enter the cathedral of Turin, nothing is mentioned about the Shroud is really there behind that glass door. We can guess it, but it would have been quite informative to mention that it is stored right there in a case that we could not see.

The Shroud Face to Face is the newest and most personally moving documentary on the centuries-old search for evidence of Jesus Christ. Author and filmmaker Robert Orlando shows physical, scientifically verifiable evidence of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Clues we've managed to overlook? Or ignore? Did the science - and new art - of photography provide us with the seeds to transform our lives, our culture - and history itself?

He knows - and shows - how changing a lens alters perspectives and priorities. He's also a scholar immersed in Biblical studies at the Princeton Theological Seminary who has a unique perspective when the theologians - and journalists - talk about the various lenses of life and "worldviews" shaping how we see the world.