"Remarkable."
The New Yorker

"Mesmerizing...intensely personal...
nothing can quite prepare you for the experience."
Alex Ross
music critic, The New Yorker

"Stunning...Perhaps the finest film ever made
on how people experience music, and one of the best-
crafted and moving documentaries in a very long time."
The Chicago Sun-Times

"A knock-out Messiaen-on-acid documentary."
The Year in Review (2008)
Chicago Sun-Times music critic Andrew Patner

"Fascinating."
The Chicago Tribune

"A remarkable film...highly, highly recommended."
98.7WFMT, Chicago

"May be the best description of the Messiaen effect on record...
circles around the mystery of music and subjectivity and
touches down on a head-spinning array of topics...
a bravura performance, not to be missed."
The Village Voice

"Marvelous, moving, amusing, intelligent."
Nathan Lee
film critic, The Village Voice

"An absolutely wonderful movie...
How many great lines there are -
I stopped counting halfway through."
David Weininger
music critic, The Boston Globe

"Takes the documentary to a
new and more intriguing level...
wickedly funny...the interview
subjects are among the
most extraordinary I have
ever seen or heard
in a documentary."
The Mobile Press-Register

"Apparition of The Eternal Church will blow your mind!
The suspense will kill you... I was utterly
blown away when I reviewed the DVD."
San Francisco Bay Times

"Fascinating."
The Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco

"A wonderful film."
88.5 KCSN Arts and Roots Radio, Los Angeles

"One of the best music
films I've ever seen."
Karl Bartos
founder of Kraftwerk
professor, Berlin University of the Arts

"Remarkable."
The Taos News

"Astonishing - a marvel."
Ronnie Gilbert
The Weavers

“One of the most spellbinding
films I have seen in my long life.”
Ann Hicks
arts reporter, The Greenville News

"A genuinely sublime documentary...
an orgy of imagination... some of
the best stuff I've seen all year."
The Reeler, New York

"The movie demonstrated,
like no other I have seen
(and in a truly original way),
the primal power that
music can exert on the
human psyche... For anyone
interested in music, it's a
film not to be missed."
Ed Hamilton
The Hotel Chelsea Blog, New York

"From time to time, we get an iconic picture
of Grace Cathedral as a public religious
institution like no other. One such moment
was a recent Friday night when we hosted
the San Francisco premiere of documentary
filmmaker Paul Festa’s Apparition of the Eternal Church...."
The Rev. Cn. Mary E. Haddad, Canon Pastor, Grace Cathedral

"I am speechless.  What brilliance!  How in the world
did you get those people to connect so deeply,
so authentically, and express it so powerfully? 
It almost didn't matter, as a viewer, what the music was.
It was the human experience of watching these
people have a human experience! Your brilliant
film seemed to bypass my intellect and touch me on
a much deeper, disturbingly beautiful, sensual level."
Mirabai Starr, editor
Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint Michael, The Archangel

"I rarely see anything so
thought-provoking. It was
like hanging out with super-
smart people for an evening
and just listening to them
talk and soaking it up....
I found myself falling in
love with a lot of them....
It was as if the music allowed
them to be honest and transparent
in a way I don't generally see.
As a Christian, coming from
a very pro-church background,
I loved hearing what people
from a completely different
world thought. I was blown away....
Go see the movie. It's amazing."
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