RVA’s International Short Film Contest Awards: “Sacred Scrap” Calls for Theology Rooted in Poverty
The word scrap comes from the Old Norse skrap, something small, leftover, seemingly insignificant. In today’s language, scrap means waste. In Sacred Scrap, scrap becomes sacrament.
The short film gently unsettles our dangerous modern illusion: that we are self-sufficient, owners rather than receivers. We have become so efficient, so “developed,” that we can afford to throw away not only thing, but the Creator Himself. Like Babylon in the Bible, we build towers of control, progress, and convenience, while forgetting the soil from which we were shaped. Laudato si’ calls this the “technocratic paradigm,” where usefulness decides value. What does not serve us is discarded, flowers, idols, rivers, even people.
And yet, theology often begins in what we throw away.
Sacred Scrap follows Om, a young ragpicker, who collects what others discard, petals once soaked in prayer, sacred residue washed into gutters. When he finds a broken idol in a dump, the film performs a quiet theological revolution: what the world calls waste, Om recognises as presence. He cleans it, shelters it, and prays. In doing so, he reminds us of what Indian theologian Sebastian Kappen insisted, that God is not found in power structures, but in the margins where life is fragile. Or as Samuel Rayan wrote, God “pitches his tent among the dispossessed.”
This is deeply Laudato si’. Creation is not raw material we own; it is gift. Life is not property but grace. The poor understand this instinctively. Om’s liturgy is not in a temple but beside a dump, echoing Aloysius Pieris’ insistence that Asian theology must rise from poverty and religiosity together.
Produced with striking restraint, Sacred Scrap (4:59 min), written and directed by Sch. Reuell Paul SJ and shot and edited by Sch. James Ekka SJ, uses silence, smoke, and small gestures to preach what sermons often fail to say. The young cast embodies a truth we have forgotten: nothing is ever truly scrap in God’s eyes.
Perhaps the film asks us a dangerous question: what if returning to God begins by bending down, humbling ourselves, to what we once threw away?
