By Amy White
The Texas Catholic
As the outside world lay slumbering and still, Anthony D’Ambrosio found himself hopelessly awake night after night. A chronic illness plagued him with a severe insomnia he could not shake. Weighed down by exhaustion and a looming sense of hopelessness, the Dallas native began to take comfort in the story of another longsuffering figure: St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest who spent his last days physically wasting away in a starvation bunker.
Starved for sleep, D’Ambrosio contemplated what those last days of deprivation might have looked like for the imprisoned friar and his companions as they grappled with their misery in the bunker: the despair, the anger, the denial they might have experienced — as well as the hope that miraculously arose even in the face of death.
“My dialogue with Kolbe was in many ways what kept me going,” D’Ambrosio said, recalling that difficult time in his life. “I felt like he was stepping into my cell, my suffering, and helping me to learn how to suffer well.”
Those late-night ruminations on suffering — and the very human reactions to it — would form the basis of D’Ambrosio’s debut film, “Triumph of the Heart,” a story recounting the 14 final days of St. Kolbe’s life. Set for release in theaters Sept. 12, the movie centers on the relationships that the bespectacled priest developed with the other doomed men as they wrestled with the reality of their impending deaths.
“I wrote it out of the fruit of my own suffering,” the writer and director of the film said. “All of the things that the characters say and all of their temptations and their darker sides were all things that I was feeling at the time when I was writing it.”
Intimately informed by D’Ambrosio’s own struggles with hopelessness and pain, the film does not shy away from the realities of those tribulations; it dives into the darkest parts of life and death to mine for the hope that can be found even there.
“It feels very surreal,” D’Ambrosio said, “to see how God has turned something that was so dark, like my illness and my struggle with depression and grief, into something so beautiful that is such a gift for so many people… It’s just such a marvelous act of God’s redemption.”
‘Hometown’
Though St. Kolbe’s story took place across the world, against the dismal backdrop of the Holocaust, D’Ambrosio said the film itself has a “hometown” in Dallas.
“Dallas is actually a big part of the launch of the project,” D’Ambrosio said. Before “Triumph of the Heart” was a feature length film, he explained, it was a 20-minute short film that he created in 2018 for the Diocese of Dallas’ The 635, a ministry serving young adults in the diocese. The short film was meant to address some of the reasons people decided to leave the Church — particularly doubt, grief, and the problem of pain — and did so through a fictionalized exploration of St. Kolbe’s final days.
“The way this story was told was so raw; and it was so relatable, and yet so beautiful,” St. Ann Catholic Church parishioner Jeff Schiefelbein, an executive producer of “Triumph of the Heart,” said. “I remember being in tears and saying, ‘We have to figure out a way to get this thing produced.’”
Through the grassroots efforts of Dallas-area Catholics, the film found the funding it needed to become a reality.
“It was the local community that stepped up in a big way… in raising the funds that were necessary for Anthony and his team to jump on an airplane with a one-way ticket to Poland to go and film the full script,” Schiefelbein said. “My prayer is that folks recognize that many of the faithful of their diocese were critical in the prayerful attempt and then the actual production of this movie.”
Cecilia Stevenson, the producer of the film and a St. Rita Catholic Church parishioner, agreed, stating that the Dallas community has been with the project from its impetus. As the film reaches its release date in September, she hopes members of the Dallas community will continue to put their support behind the project, recognizing the impact a movie like this can have — and has already had — in the lives of those who watch it.
“I think everyone has their own version of a prison,” Stevenson said. “Our movie invites people to take a look at that part of their life and envision Christ entering into it and just sitting there with them in their prison, encouraging them to finish the race.”
D’Ambrosio, who described the film as a sort of “personal retreat” into the death of a saint, said he is moved by the ways he has already seen the film reach struggling people — parents experiencing miscarriages, patients facing distressing diagnoses, believers confronted with a crisis of faith.
“So many people who’ve seen it already have struggled in ways to make sense of their own suffering,” he said, but “even the most terrifying, dark sufferings can become a gift when God’s presence becomes evident in them.”
“Triumph of the Heart” will be in theaters Sept. 12. Learn more at triumphoftheheart.com.
Cutline for featured image: In theaters Sept. 12, Anthony D’Ambrosio’s feature length film “Triumph of the Heart” tells the story of the 14 last days of St. Maximilian Kolbe’s life, which were spent in a starvation bunker alongside other prisoners. The film explores the conversations that St. Kolbe might have had with the other inmates as they grappled with the reality of their suffering and impending deaths. (Courtesy photo)
