Mira Nair and Bahman Ghobadi discuss their films in Words with Gods – a set of nine shorts on faith

Guillermo Arriaga’s ambitious brainchild, Words with Gods, brings together nine short films on the subjects of religious faith, spirituality and tradition, by acclaimed international directors, including India’s Mira Nair and Iran’s Bahman Ghobadi. The film is showing at the Venice Film Festival.

Directors whose short films are part of Words with Gods include, from left, Spain’s Álex de la Iglesia, Australia’s Warwick Thornton, Brazil’s Héctor Babenco, India’s Mira Nair, Mexico’s Guillermo ArrShow more

Arriving at the 71st Venice Film Festival at a time when it feels like intolerance and extremism are making the world crack apart, Guillermo Arriaga's ambitious brainchild, Words with Gods, brings together nine short films on the subjects of religious faith, spirituality and tradition, by acclaimed international directors, including India's Mira Nair and Iran's Bahman Ghobadi.

Truly inclusive, the project encompasses 10 “faith experiences” – such as Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Aboriginal spirituality and even atheism – 10 languages and shooting locations in eight countries.

When I meet some of the filmmakers, Nair is still jubilant about the 15-minute standing ovation Words with Gods received on Saturday. "It was amazing," she says. "I was really feeling, like, wow. You never expect these things."

She suggests that the film may have defied expectations: "When you think Words with Gods, you think something will be religious and holy and serious. But it has fabulous insanity and thought and humour."

Bookended by stories about birth and death, the film isn’t peddling propaganda. In fact, for Ghobadi, an Iranian of Kurdish ethnicity living in self-imposed exile, religion has been the cause of much personal strife. So when Arriaga asked him to participate, he said yes immediately.

“I said: ‘I love this idea because my problem is my subject and every day I have a subject about religion in normal life. In my kitchen. With my friends. With my parents. With the government, especially,’ ” he says.

Sometimes Look Up, his comedic short about conjoined twin brothers, one more pious than the other, who find themselves absurdly at odds when one wants to pursue a relationship with a woman, is "a symbol of Islam", he says.

Raised in a Sunni family under Shia rule, Ghobadi says he grew up caught between ideologies. “I got a complex about this,” he says, adding that religion felt like a “dark shadow that was following me and made me lie. In Kurdistan, if you don’t pray like the Shias, you cannot go to the university. You cannot find a job. This is not religion.”

Ghobadi now has his own concept of God. “The moment for me is a god. Maybe I can find it from the moment that the sun goes up or I can find it in someone’s eyes.”

Nair, who was raised as a Hindu and is now married to a Muslim, says that she is "not particularly religious". The title of her film, God Room, refers to the room set aside in Hindu homes for contemplation and prayer, though her home didn't have one. As a child, she says, she wondered whether God existed outside these rooms.

In the movie, a small boy sees Ganesha everywhere in an unfinished apartment in a luxury high-rise in Mumbai, while his family bicker about where to put the room dedicated to the elephant god.

Nair’s family wasn’t religious. When a relative died, she says, they “hired priests to sit in the house to recite the entire holy book for a week. But we would not recite it, or even know how to do it”.

The filmmaker has a profound interest in Indian philosophy, however, and when she was 16 she spent six months studying the entire Bhagavad Gita – a 700-verse Hindu scripture that is part of the Mahabharata – in Sanskrit.

Today, she makes each teacher and student at her Maisha film school in Uganda plant a tree in their name.

“I see God in every leaf,” says Nair. “So I can’t say I see visitations of this or that. But there’s obviously something at work that makes nature the healer that it is.”

That none of the filmmakers involved in Words with Gods set out to be prescriptive is the project's strength. There is no black and white, no trying to impose a belief or an idea on the audience. Viewers are left to make of it what they will, says the Australian director Warwick Thornton.

Ghobadi suggests that it is a film about love, ultimately.

“I didn’t come into the world with religion, I was super free,” he says. “But I believe this: each human came into the world with the love religion and you can see the love in the film. When something is moving you, it is love. I believe in this.”