By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

The film director Roland Joffe, who has yet to regain the acclaim he won a generation ago for “The Killing Fields” and “The Mission,” is shooting a movie in Argentina about the founder of Opus Dei, an elite and powerful organization within the Roman Catholic Church. The film, “There Be Dragons,” set during the Spanish Civil War, weaves fictional characters created by Mr. Joffe with the story of Saint Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, the Spaniard who founded Opus Dei and was canonized by the church.

The project was initiated by a member of Opus Dei, is partly produced and financed by the group’s members and has enlisted an Opus Dei priest to consult on the set. News of the film has set off criticism among some former Opus Dei members that the movie will be little more than propaganda for the organization. But Mr. Joffe said that he had been given complete creative control and that Opus Dei never had any influence on him.

He ditched the script he was originally given, he said, because he did not want to make what he called a “biopic about Escriva’s life. But, he added, he was intrigued by Escriva’s ideas about the power of forgiveness and the capacity of every human being for sainthood. Opus Dei - the name is Latin for work of God - teaches that ordinary work can be a path to sanctity if the believer maintains a demanding regimen of religious practices intended to achieve holiness.

“I was very interested in the idea of embarking on a piece of work that took religion seriously on its own terms and didn’t play a game where one approached religion denying its validity,” Mr. Joffe said.

The Opus Dei members behind the project were delighted to enlist Mr. Joffe, whose reputation was that of a leftist whose films asked profound ethical questions.

In the 1980s Mr. Joffe was nominated for Academy Awards as best director for “The Killing Fields,” about the genocidal war in Cambodia, and “The Mission,” about Jesuit missionaries who try to defend a South American tribe from Portuguese slave traders. But his career has sputtered since, with movies like “The Scarlet Letter” and “Captivity,” a horror movie, earning him nominations for the Golden Raspberry Awards, which honor the worst of the film industry.

Mr. Joffe’s portrayal of Escriva’s actions during the 1930s is likely to be provocative, especially in Europe. Some historians accuse Escriva of collaborating with the dictator Francisco Franco.

Mr. Joffe said he concluded after extensive research that Escriva had been eager to avoid doing anything that would jeopardize the church’s position in Spain. “Josemaria himself left Spain, and basically stayed out, and my sense is that he didn’t agree with and didn’t want to get involved in politics at the time,” he said.

Opus Dei has received tremendous publicity in recent years, most of it negative, from “The Da Vinci Code,” the 2003 novel by Dan Brown, and the 2006 movie based on the book. In both, Opus Dei is portrayed as a murderous cult whose members flog themselves and wear barbed chains around their thighs.

Some believers do practice what they call a mild form of “corporal mortification.” But what has made the group even more an object of suspicion is that some of its members do not readily identify themselves as such, and occupy influential positions in business and politics.

Heriberto Schoeffer, an independent film producer in Los Angeles and a member of Opus Dei, said he first conceived of a film dramatizing the life of Escriva after reading a book about his escape over the Pyrenees during the Spanish Civil War.

“All I wanted is for people to see a good side of him, because so many bad things are said about him and Opus Dei,” Mr. Schoeffer said.

Charlie Cox, foreground, plays the Reverend Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, who founded Opus Dei in the 1920s, in “There Be Dragons,” directed by Roland Joffe, below.