“I didn’t want to become a nun,” confesses Vera at one point during Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson’s absorbing and beautifully structured Grierson Award-winning documentary, Mother Vera. The genesis of which was a black and white photograph (see above). The portrait was taken by Tomlinson, during one of her visits to Catholic pilgrimage sites and published in her book, Ex-Voto – so named for the devotional votive offerings often left at these sites of worship.
For some sisters (and Catholics), the calling can be romanticised, childhood piety guides the novitiate on their path and any struggles with faith rarely discussed out loud. For the titular figure at the centre of this film nothing could be further from the truth.
Born Olga, Vera’s road was one filled with nightclubs, perfume, motorbikes and heroin. Not to mention the imprisoned husband before she found recovery, and God. Even after twenty years, redemption is still on the table: “I broke the lives of many people. I must be from hell.” Her backstory is slowly drip fed to the audience, almost elliptically, and delivered in short, often blunt, sentences which while never really expanded upon are without self-pity or, refreshingly, true regret. She is the perfect conduit to help the ex-prisoners in the congregation, men cloistered under her care seeking to reconcile their own addictions and reclamation.
Diegetic sound reverberates in every striking frame and there are many, austere and stunningly rich. From the nun shot from behind ringing bells, each peal seemingly moving ropes at will making her look like a marionette to close-ups of women reading scripture and their hands clutching rosaries, forefingers and thumbs cradling each bead as they silently count the prayers. Religious iconography adorns most interior walls and then there is the neon lighted cross at the head of an outdoor baptismal pool which upon first glance resembles an open grave. Images which are fleeting, often in isolation but evocative enough to render to memory.
Daily life at the St. Elisabeth monastery is filmed in stark contrast, black and white only further enhances the grey. Lighting is reduced to flickering candlelight, low camera angles focus on the swishing of the cassock as feet climb stairs, shadows move en masse until focus eventually pulls upwards and the apostolniks and skufias of the sisters, old and young alike, come into view. This contrast is never more apparent than when those dark melancholic frames give way to the daylight and the deep snow Vera rides her steed through heading towards the ominous forest on the grounds periphery. It is outside with the horses where she finds peace, her pockets of joy reserved for when she visits her family.
This documentary sits very comfortably within the realm of ‘slow cinema’, thematically (and visually) similar to films like Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) and The Innocents (Fontaine, 2016) but with a fundamental truth and reality at its core. It carries emotional heft as the search for liberation and personal freedom becomes ever more apparent. The shift in the journey of the enigmatic Olga/Vera – herself the personification of a votive offering – also occurs in the filmmaking too. The slow transition to colour in those last twenty minutes is glorious and perfectly judged, the first initial bleeding of which comes after the inky black apostolnik is seen burning into ash and dissolving into the cold night air.
Mother Vera defies expectation. It is a visually gorgeous meditation in (mostly) monochrome – filmed with creativity and originality through a non-judgemental lens about one resilient and courageous woman’s search for identity and self-acceptance. Embleton and Tomlinson took a still image and over 91 minutes made it come to life onscreen.
The Framing Device 