A lot is said during the quiet moments in Gianfranco Rosi’s In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis, when the holy figure takes a pause from giving hopeful or apologetic speeches to stare into the abyss, lost in his own thoughts and prayers. Those are opportunities for Rosi, the documentary film-maker behind Fire at Sea and Notturno, to invite the audience into contemplation and leave room for skepticism and ambivalence.

“The silence for me is more important than the notes itself,” Rosi tells the Guardian over a Zoom call from Manhattan. “My own interpretation as a film-maker is to give space to silence. Sometimes words aren’t even enough.”

He occasionally uses those contemplative sections to cut away to scenes of recent devastation or historical oppression, as if weighing all the ceremoniousness put on by the papal office against the suffering the church has had a hand in or has done nothing functional to remedy. In Viaggio often feels like it’s measuring the value in the current pope’s radical efforts to modernize Catholicism and reach the masses. Whether those efforts come up short depends on who’s watching and how much faith they have in religion and humanity.

Early in the film, we hear a distress call from refugees on a sinking boat near the Italian island of Lampedusa, where Fire at Sea was shot. Their cries for help are not answered by the divine but instead a coastguard asking for the sinking vessel’s position. Rosi explains that the repeated question, “what’s your position?” is meant to hang over the film, provoking consideration of where we stand when it comes to religious and political matters

Rosi is sitting by the window in the same Meatpacking District apartment he’s had since attending film school at New York University in the 80s. He’s wearing an all-black ensemble with matching hat and tinted frames. The Italian film-maker, born in Eritrea, can easily pass as a Milan fashion designer, speaking with a heavy accent and big hand gestures while a green marker is nestled between his fingers. He occasionally scribbles down notes – points that he wants to return to in our conversation without interrupting his current train of thought.

By his own admission, Rosi is secular. The director largely keeps his own beliefs (or lack thereof) at bay in a film that dutifully follows Pope Francis to war-ravaged countries and traumatized communities, where he steps up to podiums to offer words meant to inspire or heal. As usual with Rosi, there are no voiceover narrations or talking head interviews. Instead, the film just acts as witness to three dozen trips the pope embarked on over the past decade, observing his work and his words, admiring his progressive stance on gay marriage, prison reform and the climate, without shying away from the fissures and contradictions. Rosi couches passages where the pope condemns war and the arms trade with shots of fighter jets escorting his plane and military processions that greet him in places such the US and Dubai.

Contradictions and secularism aside, there’s a genuine fondness and admiration Rosi has for the pope, felt in both his film and our midday Zoom call. “The first meeting I had with the pope, he gave me a rosary,” Rosi recalls. “I said, ‘I’m not really a believer.’ He said, ‘just keep it, it’s good for you.’ He has a very good sense of humour.”

That initial meeting took place at the Vatican after the pope had seen Fire at Sea, Rosi’s Oscar-nominated look at the migration crisis in Lampedusa. The pope had been close to that issue, having visited Lampedusa just months after taking up the papacy in 2013. In 2021, Rosi reconnected with the Vatican after the pope visited Iraq. The film-maker had just spent three years in the war-torn area to make his 2020 documentary Notturno. Rosi was starting to see his work overlapping with Pope Francis’s itinerary.

Between Lampedusa and Baghdad, the pope had made 34 trips abroad, including a visit to Juárez, Mexico, where Rosi had shot 2010’s El Sicario, Room 164. That’s what inspired Rosi to curate the Vatican’s travelogue materials along with news and historical archives, and some of his own footage from El Sicario and Notturno. His film would observe the pope as he observed the world. “We could draw a map of the human condition,” says Rosi.

The film-maker also travelled alongside the pope to Canada last summer, when the latter apologized to Indigenous communities for the genocide aided and enabled by the church. The pope’s apology tour in Canada took place after remains of thousands of Indigenous children forcibly removed from their communities throughout the past two centuries were uncovered at mass burial sites at residential schools run by priests and nuns. His visit was a contentious one.

In a conversation about justice and reconciliation, the film-maker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers discussed the pope’s visit with the Women Talking director, Sarah Polley. They discussed the anger and vindication felt and the power differential between the wealthy and protected church doing the apologizing and the vulnerable Indigenous communities, some still fighting for clean water, who received it. “Some people felt a sense of healing to hear this man apologize on behalf of this institution,” Tailfeathers told Polley. “Others felt ambivalent. Here’s another spectacle from an institution like the Catholic church, wherein we’re expected to accept an apology. And then they leave and nothing changes.”

Rosi sensed that overwhelming ambivalence during his visit. “I knew that people weren’t accepting [his apology],” he says. That’s why he decided to shoot the apology out of focus. The pope’s words are heard across this blur, as though it’s some hazy abstract concept in his mind that hasn’t really taken hold. “This was a moment of suspension,” says Rosi. “There was still something that is not finished.”

Rosi had a meeting with the pope just five days before our interview. He relays the pope’s parting words to him: “Be courageous and take risks. There are too many conservative people around us.” It’s fascinating advice from a figure whose risks often feel calculated and safe.

Throughout the film, we see the pope celebrated for publicly denouncing the Indigenous and Armenian genocides. He takes a much more cautious approach when visiting Palestine and Sri Lanka (not seen in the film). In those places, the language around violence and human rights abuses can be much more contentious. Using words like genocide, as some have referred to Sri Lanka’s bombardment of Tamil civilians in 2009 near the end of a 25-year civil war, isn’t as generally accepted.

Rosi expresses his own disappointment that the pope has stayed silent as women in Iran protest over Masha Amini’s 2022 death at the hand’s of the country’s so-called morality police. He believes there’s an unspoken complication preventing the pope from speaking out that involves Iran’s ties to Iraq, where a vulnerable Christian population remains.

Despite all his courageous words and conviction, Rosi argues, the pope is a head of state who is protected by armed guards, escorted by the occasional fighter jet, and guided by diplomacy (as well as the holy spirit) when he speaks, or stays quiet.

“The film,” Rosi says, “is also a portrait of defeat.”

• In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis is out in US cinemas on 31 March and in the UK at a later date