Yael Bartana’s Inferno opens with a time and place-holder. Though we see a re-enactment of a historical saga spanning thousands of years, the contemporaneity of the film is defined right away.  We are not witnessing the recreation of historical events but are watching contemporary and future ones. Therefore, the opening titles situate the inauguration of the Third Temple, O Templo de Salomão in Sao Paulo, Brasil, in the Anno Domini 2014.

The endeavour to create a replica of Jerusalem’s Solomon Temple in Sao Paulo was undertaken by Bishop Edir Macedo, the founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), who vowed that since he couldn’t take his entire congregation to the Holy Land, he would build the new Jerusalem in Sao Paulo. The Temple is a perfect replica of the historical one and is based on the plan as detailed in the Bible itself. 

in Inferno Bartana suggests that in rebuilding this religious symbol, it will also repeat its tragic history. The Brazilian temple would be destroyed – as were its two predecessors, its worshippers would be exiled, its remains will suffer the fate of empty religious rites and cheap tourism.

Inferno’s narrative roughly comprises 3 parts. The first part shows the procession towards the inauguration of the Solomonic Temple. The second, its destruction, and the third, a clone of the touristic and religious routines of Jerusalem’s Western Wall. Bartana’s sophisticated camera work in Inferno, that is, the use of slow motion, the multiple camera angles and editing speeds, as well as the soundtrack and iconography of the occasion enhance the narrative and take the whole experience to almost larger than life mystic heights.