The Latin Cathedral stands just off Lviv's market square, at the centre of a historic quarter inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Begun in the fourteenth century and completed over generations, it is fundamentally a Gothic church: tall pointed windows, ribbed vaults and a soaring interior height that the eye still registers before anything else. What sits on top of that frame is the record of everything that happened afterwards. Successive fires, patrons and fashions added Baroque altars, gilded ornament and painted decoration, so that the medieval structure now houses an interior of quite different temperament, lit by stained glass of varying periods. Around the outside, funerary chapels and carved memorials crowd the walls, among them the celebrated adjacent chapel built by a merchant family, whose blackened stone facade is one of the most photographed surfaces in the city. As the principal Roman Catholic church of a city where several rites have long coexisted, the cathedral is also a way into Lviv's layered identity. The film combines architectural detail, aerial views and the ordinary life of a parish.
