Madrid, Spain. If all goes as planned, in the first months of 2014 the martyrdom experience of the Claretian Community of Barbastro – the Martyr Seminary as John Paul II called it – will be able to be seen in commercial theatres and will be seen by kinds of people.

The Spanish town of Ciudad Rodrigo, located in the province of Salamanca a few kilometers from the border with Portugal, is the scene of much of the filming. Headquartered there is Contracorriente Producciones [Counter-Current Productions], a company born in 2006 with a clear Christian inspiration with which the Congregation has signed the agreement for implementation and promotion of the film.

The filming which began on September 26th, has already been visited by Fr. Manuel A. Tamargo, Provincial Superior of Santiago, and will be supervised in the coming days by Fr. José Beruete, Director of the Museum of the Martyrs of Barbastro. The project involves more than 50 actors and two hundred ‘extras’ whose presence is no longer strange to the inhabitants of the city. Various means of communication, local television stations and newspapers from the communities of Castile, León, and Aragón have already covered the shooting of this film. The actors include faces known to the public Spanish such as Jesús Guzmán or Elena Furiase. The Director is Pablo Moreno.

The film will go by the name “A Forbidden God” and is the most important project in which the producer has been involved so far. Two of his earlier works (‘Jesus, Pilgrim of the Light’ and ‘Pablo of Tarsus, the Final Journey) have been shown at major international competitions of religious cinema like those of Trent (Italy) and Toronto (Canada).