On a recent afternoon, Caroline Golum was sprawled out on the couch in her Brooklyn apartment. There were posters on the wall for the Hollywood classic “Sunset Boulevard” and the Bertolt Brecht play “The Threepenny Opera.” A Mets game played on a muted TV across the room.
“You have to be meshuggeneh if you’re going to do a film the way we did this movie,” she said.
Ms. Golum, a 38-year-old director, writer and film programmer was referring to her second movie, “Revelations of Divine Love,” a fictionalized account of the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, who is believed to have written the oldest surviving book in English by a woman.
Even in the world of indie cinema, that premise doesn’t exactly scream runaway hit. But like her 14th-century heroine, who wrote about seeing Christ during an illness, Ms. Golum had a vision.
It came to her at a low moment in 2017. Her debut feature, a satire of the ruling class called “A Feast of Man” she had scraped together $50,000 to make, hadn’t broken through, and she was toiling away at a job in tech.
“I was really dispirited and down and miserable and unhappy,” she recalled.
One day, her friend Laurence Bond asked if he could read her a paper on Julian that he was working on for his undergraduate studies in medieval history.
Then, as now, Ms. Golum was a Jewish woman with no religious attachment to Christian theology. But she was riveted by Mr. Bond’s recounting of Julian, an anchoress, or religious hermit, who agreed to be sealed inside a cell in a church in Norwich, England, to focus on the spiritual life.
“She wrote about Christ and about love and about this experience that she’d had with so much kindness and empathy and honesty and warmth,” Ms. Golum said, “and I had never encountered anything like that before.”
She worked with Mr. Bond to adapt the story into a film that took her almost a decade to make. It ended up costing about $200,000, money she cobbled together with a crowdfunding page and emails to “everybody whose birthday I’d ever been invited to,” she said. The rest she strung together with grants, a bank loan and a credit card.
“I’m never paying off that credit card,” she said, adding that she doesn’t recommend others follow her model. “This is descriptive, not prescriptive.”
To potential collaborators, Ms. Golum sold her idea as a “Canal Street ‘Caravaggio’,” a reference to the deliberately anachronistic 1986 period drama about the Renaissance artist directed by the British filmmaker Derek Jarman.
“People were quite taken with the idea, both because I’m crazy and because I have good taste,” she said.
The pitch worked on the cinematographer Gabe Elder, who was dating a friend of hers. Grant Stoops, who signed on as art director, was aligned with her idea of a crafty, D.I.Y. film that reveled in its artifice. Tessa Strain, a childhood friend and occasional actor, accepted the lead role.
In early 2021, they shot some proof-of-concept footage. It included what Ms. Golum called the “sexy parts” of the script — scenes about the Peasants’ Revolt and the outbreak of the Black Plague, for instance.
It helped her net a $10,000 grant, which gave her the confidence to launch a crowdfunding campaign. Then she set about assembling a ragtag band of film workers, professional and amateur actors and true believers (in independent cinema), some of whose movie projects Ms. Golum had worked on, to fill out the cast and crew.
In January 2023, she called them to a warehouse in Ridgewood, Queens. Together, they fashioned an unapologetically homespun set. They built the walls and crossbeams of Julian’s cell — where she writes and from which she offers counsel to visitors through a window — out of insulation. When a barrel was needed, they borrowed one from the brewery next door.
“We shot the hell out of that barrel,” Ms. Golum said.
Ms. Golum, who grew up in Los Angeles and moved to New York in 2006, said she tried to give her team members “a context where they could experiment and do unusual things — like build a medieval church indoors or create a 14th-century soundscape from scratch.”
It worked. They were dedicated to the project, but equally, they were devoted to Ms. Golum. “All these people were not in the room for anyone else,” Ms. Strain said by phone.
Establishing shots use miniatures composed of cardboard and foam and background paintings of the sky on which swirling brushstrokes are visible. The homemade look was not meant to convey any irony about the story itself.
“It’s an unfashionably sincere movie,” Ms. Golum said, before interrupting her train of thought to yell at her baseball team: “Base hit — let’s go! Sorry, game on.”
“I didn’t want to make another really nasty cynical movie,” she continued, referring to her debut feature. “My next film will probably be a really nasty, cynical movie.”
Clutching a maroon Juul that matched her nails, which were decorated with quatrefoils, Ms. Golum joked that nicotine had helped power her through the long production process.
She hoped her film would be “a test case for how to make a movie with very limited means, with a lot of people who are very passionate about it.” She also wanted to present an idea of a woman in the Middle Ages different from what people might imagine.
“It’s not like you’re just some illiterate peasant-breeding sow,” Ms. Golum said. “You actually have agency. You live in a society that may not afford you the greatest amount of personal freedom, but there are still ways in which you can exercise your autonomy within that system. I think it’s a useful way of looking at the way we live now.”
“Revelations of Divine Love” has earned some raves. Writing in The Baffler, Robert Rubsam praised Ms. Golum for creating a film that “takes what seems vast and incomprehensible and reduces it to something you can hold in the palm of your hand, bringing Julian’s time into our own.”
She is showing it at independent theaters in New York — Low Cinema, Nitehawk and Spectacle, among others — sometimes attracting sellout crowds. That evening, she was headed for Anthology Film Archives in the East Village for its third screening in as many nights.
“If I could maintain this exact number of people and the specific people involved at every level of the production, and I could make a film every year for the rest of my life, it would be a dream come true,” she said.
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