Praytime
A father guides his son through a spiritual rite of passage that blurs the line between connection and control.
Written and directed by Joshua Tate
A father guides his ten-year-old son down the evangelical road to salvation, tinting glasses of water to illustrate sin and sacrifice. When the father confides that there’s no direct evidence of the Resurrection, their ritual slips into uneasy terrain, blurring the line between sincerity and performance at a cost neither can fully name.
Exploring the coexistence of connection and control
I was raised in a culture where obedience was framed as love and certainty as virtue—often in warm, covert ways that made the underlying authoritarianism difficult to recognize. Praytime is my way of unpacking that. It’s a quiet, intimate film about the emotional cost of raising a child inside a system that confuses control for care. Drawing from my own experience, it captures the quiet moments where something inside you starts to question—but love and the need to belong keep you silent.
—Joshua Tate
