Where Spirituality Meets Identity

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MOVIE REVIEW
Pride & Prayer
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Genre: Documentary
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 3m
Director(s): Panta Mosleh
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 Vancouver Queer Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: PRIDE & PRAYER is less about giving answers and more about daring to live inside the questions. In her debut feature-length documentary, Canadian-Kurdish filmmaker and performer Panta Mosleh turns the camera on herself, exploring the clash between two pillars of her identity: her Muslim faith and her queerness. The result is a deeply intimate film that offers no easy resolutions but instead presents a raw and ongoing negotiation of belonging. For anyone who has ever felt pulled in opposite directions by community, belief, and personal truth, this film will resonate deeply.

Mosleh invites us into her world—her solitude, her prayers, her conversations, her silences. At just over an hour, the film explores with quiet patience. There are no talking heads, no voice-of-God narration guiding us through the issues. Instead, PRIDE & PRAYER embraces subjectivity. This is not an academic essay about theology or sexuality; it’s an open diary, filtered through the eye of a woman who refuses to simplify the contradictions that have shaped her life.

What elevates the documentary is Mosleh’s grounding as a storyteller. She isn’t new to the industry—her résumé includes years of production work, training at Groundlings in Los Angeles, and acting roles ranging from prestige series like THE LAST OF US to festival-screened features like A24’s ETERNITY. Here, though, she steps into a more vulnerable role, using her skills to craft a narrative that is less about performance and more about bearing witness. Her background in comedy may seem distant from the solemnity of this subject. Still, training has sharpened her timing and her ability to read when a moment needs levity, when it requires silence, and when it must simply exist.

Mosleh highlights the reality that there is no tidy conclusion for individuals caught between conflicting cultural, spiritual, and personal expectations. One of the film’s strengths is its ability to balance solitude with conversation. There are quiet, introspective passages—Mosleh in prayer, walking through spaces alone, her face etched with doubt. These are juxtaposed with intimate dialogues that reveal both support and tension in her community. Some exchanges sting with honesty, others comfort with solidarity. This interplay highlights how belonging is never just internal or external but an ongoing negotiation between the two.

PRIDE & PRAYER succeeds because it never feels like traditional advocacy. It is not trying to persuade an audience of one position or another. Instead, it seeks empathy. By exposing her own contradictions, Mosleh invites viewers to reflect on their own. The vulnerability on display is disarming—when she admits to believing that Allah could never accept her for who she is, it lands with the weight of years of internalized struggle. And when she speaks of love and identity as inextricable, the film shifts from being about religion versus sexuality to something more universal: the human need to be accepted without condition.

Mosleh herself amplifies the impact. She is not just the filmmaker but also the subject, and that dual role infuses the project with authenticity. She understands the weight of putting her own story on the line, especially given the potential risks of navigating both a conservative religious context and the scrutiny of the broader world. The courage to claim her space in both communities, without fully belonging to either, makes the film more than a documentary—it becomes an act of resistance.

On a technical level, the production is modest, but the sparseness works in the film’s favor. The color palette is naturalistic, the editing is restrained, and the sound is intimate. Nothing distracts from the story being told. The runtime ensures the pacing doesn’t overstay its welcome, though some viewers may wish for a deeper dive into certain conversations or theological reflections. Yet brevity aligns with honesty; this is not a lecture, it’s a glimpse.

By the end, PRIDE & PRAYER doesn’t resolve, nor does it pretend to. Instead, it reframes the conflict as an ongoing dialogue between faith and self. In refusing resolution, it respects the complexity of its subject. That choice might frustrate audiences looking for closure, but it honors the truth of living “in between”—a truth many will recognize in their own ways.

PRIDE & PRAYER ultimately stands as a personal but resonant meditation on identity. For LGBTQIA2S+ audiences, it offers a reflection of struggles too often sidelined or simplified. For those outside that experience, it provides a window into the emotional cost of navigating faith and queerness. Most of all, it marks Panta Mosleh as a filmmaker unafraid to be vulnerable, to let questions hang in the air, and to trust that an audience will sit with her in the uncertainty. That trust makes the film not only brave but necessary.

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[photo courtesy of PK STUDIO PRODUCTIONS]

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