On this episode of the Hard Faith Podcast, Spencer Folmar sits down with filmmaker, director, writer, and educator Sam Sorich for a wide-ranging and deeply honest conversation about faith, art, envy, conversion, and the spiritual cost of creating meaningful work in a volatile cultural moment. Sam reflects on his connection to Hard Faith Fest, where his visually striking anthology feature Eight Beats—eight short films inspired by the Beatitudes—won the Audience Awardand emerged as one of the festival’s most talked-about films.
Sam shares his unconventional journey into filmmaking, including an early artistic calling, a dramatic turn toward the Catholic seminary, a season of atheism, and a hard-won return to faith shaped by cinema, philosophy, and the work of René Girard. He unpacks how watching thousands of films during seminary became both an escape and a form of spiritual and artistic formation, eventually leading to a vision for Eight Beats as a Catholic answer to Kieslowski’s Decalogue—bold, incarnational, and unafraid of complexity.
The conversation also explores Sam’s international life (from Chicago to Colombia to California), his recent season teaching film, documentary, mimetic theory, horror, and AI at John Paul the Great Catholic University, and how mentoring young filmmakers became an unexpected source of healing for wounds formed earlier in his faith journey. Sam reflects candidly on envy, rivalry, and comparison in the creative life—especially watching close friends succeed—and offers a powerful spiritual framework for resisting the “Luciferian light” through humility, prayer, and identification with the blind beggar crying out for mercy.
Finally, Sam previews his new documentary project exploring UFOs, extraterrestrial phenomena, and the Catholic imagination, asking provocative questions about incarnation, reality, and how faith traditions can interpret a world that feels increasingly re-enchanted and unstable. It’s a thoughtful, theologically rich, and emotionally vulnerable episode that speaks directly to artists, filmmakers, and believers navigating doubt, ambition, and calling in real time.
