The question of how to live freely causes great inner conflict for the titular nun of Mother Vera, the absorbing and majestically shot debut feature documentary of Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson, which had its world premiere at Visions du Reel in Nyon in the International Feature Film Competition.
Vera entered Saint Elisabeth Convent, a Russian Orthodox convent on the outskirts of Minsk in Belarus, at the age of twenty. She was addicted to heroin, and reluctantly committed to waiting there for a year for her partner Oleg to be released from prison. After he blindsided her with the devastating news he had met another woman, she decided not to give up her new monastic ways — and only much later has come to reconsider this path.
Vera is given time in this quiet, contemplative portrait to tell her own story in sparse reflections. Frame after frame come black-and-white images of arresting aesthetic beauty, painting the convent and its surroundings in an aura that is almost magical and otherworldly. Sequences of Vera, draped in a long black habit on the back of a white horse cantering through deep snowy expanses of woodland, are fairytale-like and seem almost out of time. But this stunning, stylised quality is deeply ambivalent, as it emerges that the calmly ordered world of the convent is limiting, in terms of the emotional repression and detachment it enables.
Vera recalls having been desperate to stop feeling, because it was too painful, and to dissolve into her environment. Aching for a substitute to heroin, which initially got her hooked through the seductive illusion of access to a mysterious, higher world and sense of peace before it revealed its ravaging “real face,” she grasped onto the rituals of the convent as another arcane obsession to lose herself in. Amid chanting, bells, candles and prayers, it is easy to see how the trappings of Orthodox religion, portrayed in stark light and shadow, might offer a sense of refuge and spiritual repose.
Guilt and a kind of punitive asceticism also come through as motivations for Vera, as she reflects in snatches on the damage toll of her old life, from HIV diagnoses to robbing relatives and pushing drugs. Her dominant presence and intensity is compelling to watch; she recognises the influence she has had over others, and has become afraid of it. The monastic life is a shield from romantic love more than it is a conduit for spirituality for this member of the order, and while she tells a superior she is there to search for freedom, she admits she is yet to define it. And she is not the only one: Saint Elisabeth and its farm also welcome men who are in rehabilitation, with hooliganism, clandestine chemistry and the like on their rap sheets, and similar stories to Vera’s around crime and substance dependence. Hiding away from the ugliness and chaos of the outside world, they live from “liturgy to liturgy,” reticent to return, and refer to their new routines as a different form of addiction.
After Vera reaches the point of burning her habit and venturing back out into the wider world, black and white shifts to colour, a signal of renewed fullness that may not be subtle, but makes sense within the documentary’s very sensory approach to the experienced environment. Haras du Paty, a horse stable and farm in the Camargue region of France, is a new sanctuary for Vera, her dressage lessons and river-swimming coming to us in close-up, sun-kissed fragments, accompanied by birdsong. Integrating the body and its movements into nature’s rhythms takes practice, and it is as if she is learning to feel again from square one. For Vera, the material world is a sublime but ambiguous gift, offering pleasure or problems requiring extreme solutions.
Directors, cinematography: Cécile Embleton, Alys Tomlinson
Producer: Laura Shacham
Editing: Romain Beck, Cécile Embleton
Sound: Leonardo Cauteruccio
Production company, Sales: She Makes Productions (UK)
Festival: Visions du Reel (International Feature Film Competition)
In Belarusian, French, English
91 minutes
