It's a story of faith expressed with simple grace and the small deeds of a pardoned sinner still searching for forgiveness. It is like a minimalist stage play -- three acts, two characters, quietly redemptive.
Overview
With few options, newly pardoned convict Leila agrees to work as an assistant to a blind pastor. Father Jacob spends his days answering the letters of the needy, which Leila finds pointless. But when the letters stop, the pastor is devastated and Leila finds herself cast in a new role.
Director and cast
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
There's a sparse elegance to writer-director Klaus Haro's Letters to Father Jacob, a lean, engrossing character study about loneliness, redemption and the power of faith.
Transforms a picture-postcard location and odd-couple narrative into a pretty, and pretty predictable, snooze.
Letters could be dismissed as a soap opera, but that would be unfair to this beautiful work.
There's only one thing worse than a leaden moral fable that tackles issues of forgiveness with sledgehammer contrivances, and that's one that attempts to mask its manipulative corniness with an air of trumped-up gravity.
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