Director: Martin Scorsese
Centuries apart and worlds apart in circumstance, a handful of figures venerated across history share one thing in common: each gave up comfort, safety, or their own life for something they believed mattered more.
What is Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints about?
Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints is a documentary series that turns its attention to some of the most enduring names associated with sainthood, tracing the arc of each life from ordinary beginnings to acts that made them historically significant. Figures covered include Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi, John the Baptist, Thomas Becket, Mary Magdalene, Moses the Black, Sebastian, and Maximilian Kolbe, spanning very different eras, regions, and circumstances. Rather than treating these as isolated legends, the series situates each figure within the political and social pressures of their time, showing how personal conviction collided with power, war, or persecution. Dramatized reenactments sit alongside historical framing, aiming to make centuries-old lives feel immediate without losing sight of the historical record they're drawn from. The result is less a single narrative than a gallery of individual stories connected by sacrifice, examined with an eye for the human decisions behind the legend.
Cast & crew
The reenactment cast includes Liah O'Prey, Yahya Mahayni, and Lorenzo de Moor, portraying figures drawn from across a wide historical span. Martin Scorsese, who also directs, brings a filmmaker's eye for character and moral tension to material that could easily flatten into hagiography, choosing instead to foreground the doubts, choices, and consequences each figure faced.
Context & significance
Released in 2024, the series carries Scorsese's name both as director and as a long-time observer of faith and conscience in his own feature filmmaking, a thread that runs through decades of his work. Each episode runs roughly 45 minutes and focuses on a single historical figure, allowing the series to go deep on one life at a time rather than compressing multiple stories into a single sweeping account. The documentary format leans on historical scholarship while using dramatization to bring distant centuries closer to a contemporary audience.
Where & how to watch
Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints is available on K-Time with Persian subtitles, letting Persian-speaking viewers follow the original English narration and dialogue with accurate translation. A free K-Time account is all that's needed to log in and watch; the page itself can be read without signing in.