"Asherah: A Love Odyssey" Written, Produced and Directed by Gary Joseph Mazeffa
- 29 jun
- 6 min de lectura
Could you explain the challenges you faced in making Asherah: A Love Odyssey?
Without question, the greatest challenge was casting the adult Asherah.
The film opens with a twenty-eight-year-old woman walking into a cathedral and placing God Himself on trial. That role demanded extraordinary emotional strength, intelligence, vulnerability, and presence. I knew from the beginning that if audiences did not believe her within the first few minutes, the entire film would fail.
More than 4,000 actresses submitted for the role, and I spent months reviewing auditions before finding Angelina Bella, an actress born and raised in Argentina. She possessed the rare combination of strength, beauty, confidence, and humanity that the character required. Once she entered the cathedral in costume, I knew we had found our Asherah.
Like every independent production, there were financial and logistical challenges, but finding the right person to carry the story was by far the greatest.
The screenplay is very original. What inspired this concept, and how does it relate to the themes of decision-making and confrontation in the script?
The original idea began almost eight years ago with a simple creative question.
I found myself asking: What if the expected return of a great spiritual figure arrived in a form humanity did not anticipate?
That thought experiment eventually evolved into something much larger. As I continued exploring ancient traditions, mythology, and spiritual history, I found myself drawn to figures such as Asherah from the ancient Near East and Amaterasu from Japan. Although they emerged from very different cultures, both represented aspects of the divine feminine that fascinated me. Asherah, who appears in ancient Near Eastern traditions as the consort of Yahweh, became one of the earliest inspirations for the story, while Amaterasu brought an equally important Eastern perspective. Together, these discoveries became the spark—not the destination.
Rather than retelling any existing religious story, I began imagining an original cinematic mythology centered on remembrance, reconciliation, and humanity's evolving relationship with the sacred.
The confrontation inside the cathedral became the natural starting point. It is not intended as an attack on faith, but as an invitation to ask difficult questions. Throughout the film, confrontation gradually becomes understanding, because I believe growth often begins not with certainty, but with the courage to question.
What was the development process like? Was it originally intended as a feature film?
From the beginning, I envisioned Asherah as a large story.
Over the years, I moved back and forth between developing it as a television series and as a feature film with multiple chapters. Ultimately, I realized that Asherah: A Love Odyssey should serve as the opening chapter of a much larger journey.
The film follows Asherah at three defining stages of her life: age twelve, age eighteen, and age twenty-eight, when she finally begins to understand her mission on Earth.
Although this first film stands on its own, it was always designed to open the door to additional chapters. The story covers a great deal of emotional, spiritual, and philosophical ground, and one film alone could never contain the entire vision.
Given the enormous complexity of the script, what were the essential technical and artistic requirements for filming?
Authenticity became one of our highest priorities.
The opening cathedral sequence establishes the emotional foundation for the entire film, so finding the right location proved surprisingly difficult. We spent nearly five months searching for a church or cathedral whose architecture, atmosphere, and leadership would support the production while also respecting the sanctity of the space.
Once we found the right location, everything else began falling into place.
Artistically, maintaining continuity between the three ages of Asherah was equally important. Although portrayed by different actresses, audiences needed to feel they were watching the same soul growing through different seasons of life.
Music also became an essential storyteller. Rather than simply supporting scenes, it often carries emotions that words intentionally leave unspoken.
What are the goals of the film, and what obstacles have you encountered?
My hope is that Asherah: A Love Odyssey expands the conversation surrounding religion and spirituality by presenting timeless questions through a contemporary lens.
The film is not interested in replacing existing traditions. Instead, it explores what they may have in common. Throughout the story, Eastern and Western philosophies, mythologies, and spiritual traditions are allowed to coexist, converse, and enrich one another.
Many years ago, Joseph Campbell observed that humanity possessed powerful myths, but they were largely shaped by the cultures, regions, and nations from which they emerged. That observation stayed with me.
In many ways, Asherah is my attempt to continue that conversation by imagining a story for an increasingly interconnected world—a myth that speaks across cultures rather than belonging to only one of them.
That ambition has also become one of the film's greatest challenges. Asherah does not fit neatly into traditional categories of science fiction, fantasy, romance, spiritual cinema, or religious drama, although it contains elements of all of them.
But perhaps stories that attempt something new should not fit comfortably inside existing boxes.
What appeals to you about this style of writing, and what kind of impact do you hope to have on the audience?
My greatest hope is not that audiences leave with my answers.
It is that they leave asking their own questions.
I intentionally allowed the film to remain open to interpretation. I wanted viewers to participate in the meaning rather than simply receive it.
One of the most rewarding experiences has been hearing people describe meanings they discovered in the film that I had never consciously intended while writing or directing it. Rather than correcting them, I often find those interpretations heartfelt, surprising, and sometimes closer to the truth than anything I could have planned.
I believe stories become fully alive only when audiences complete them with their own experiences.
If people leave the theater continuing the conversation, then the film has succeeded.
Tell us three interesting facts about this production. And tell us a detail that only you know and notice, but that would enrich us to know.
Three interesting facts
1. The cathedral sequence tells its own story through music.
Most audiences may not immediately realize that the opening scene deliberately avoids traditional sacred music. As Asherah enters the cathedral, the score begins with the bold confidence of a Spaghetti Western. It gradually transitions toward Eastern influences through Japanese-inspired instrumentation and war drums before moving through unexpected musical textures. Only during the confessional scene does the music finally arrive at something recognizably sacred.
The music itself mirrors the emotional journey—from confrontation, to mystery, to reconciliation.
2. Asherah silently embodies multiple spiritual traditions before she ever fully explains herself.
In the opening sequence, her gestures, posture, and prayer profiles intentionally echo elements associated with Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Celtic spirituality, and subtle visual influences inspired by Amaterasu and Japanese mythology. These references are woven quietly into the film because one of its central ideas is that humanity's search for the sacred has always spoken many languages.
3. The story was designed around emotional rhythm rather than strict chronology.
Many scenes were shaped according to emotional progression rather than conventional timeline. The film is intended to feel like memory, music, dream, and spiritual inquiry unfolding together rather than a purely linear narrative.
A detail that only I notice
One detail that means a great deal to me is that almost every major conflict in the film quietly transforms into reconciliation.
What begins as accusation becomes dialogue.
What begins as separation moves toward communion.
Even the opening confrontation inside the cathedral is not ultimately about placing God on trial. It is about placing humanity's assumptions on trial.
For me, that quiet transformation is the true heartbeat of Asherah: A Love Odyssey.
It's been a pleasure interviewing you!
Thank you for your time!
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DIRECTOR STATEMENT:
Asherah: A Love Odyssey began with a simple intuition—that something within the story humanity inherited remained unfinished.
Rather than approaching the film as argument or doctrine, I approached it as an experience: a cinematic space where confrontation, memory, longing, loss, and reconciliation could unfold through image, rhythm, and presence rather than explanation. Structured in five movements—invitation, witness, origin, completion, and declaration—the film gradually opens into a deeper question surrounding the sacred feminine and its absence within the foundations of Western mythology.
At its center is not rebellion, but restoration. The re-emergence of a feminine presence that does not seek to replace what came before, but to complete it. The tension between covenant and abandonment, creation and participation, silence and return became essential to the emotional architecture of the work.
I chose restraint wherever possible—favoring stillness over spectacle, and suggestion over conclusion. My intention was not to resolve the questions the film raises, but to leave them open long enough for the audience to encounter themselves within them.
In the end, Asherah does not offer an answer. It offers a threshold.
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BUEIFF Press Team
Buenos Aires Intenational Film Festival
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