This course explores the limits of truth-telling and representation. Semantic and text-based approaches have a limited capacity to express the lived experience of people. This is perhaps most obvious when it comes to individual or collective trauma; to the void of reality that is beyond expression (the ‘real’ in Lacanian thinking); and to the experienced presence of sacred and divine realities - three experiences that are often referred to as the ‘unspeakable’, as something beyond articulation. In comparison to purely verbal representations of such experiences, film offers a rich repertoire of audiovisual tools that offers many opportunities of representing realities that are difficult to express in language. In this course, such filmic representations are explored by analyzing the cinematographic and narrative elements of film. In addition, the course discusses the limits of filmic representation as well, for film has its limits too when it comes to traumatic and sacred experiences: they can be not only unspeakable, but also ‘unimaginable’. However, film can at the very least probe the boundaries of what can be expressed; filmic methods and techniques can be mobilized to show what it means not to be able to imagine, not to be able to speak. In the third place, this course not only explores the representation of the ‘unspeakable’; it also applies a film as religion approach that enables students to understand the ‘religious work’ of film: how film may mediate (reveal, produce and transmit) sacred and divine realities and experiences. Students learn to unravel the representation and mediation of the unspeakable by carefully analyzing the cinematographic and narrative elements of film.