16/05/2024 - Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson’s contemplative documentary follows a nun who is craving inner liberation, and her process of repentance

A convent and a young nun in focus somewhere in the chilly northern part of Eastern Europe, couched in elegant black-and-white imagery – such surface details inevitably evoke a primal association with Pawel Pawlikowski’s masterpiece Ida [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pawel Pawlikowski
interview: Pawel Pawlikowski
film profile]. The eponymous protagonist of Mother Vera [+see also:
trailer
film profile], currently showing at the Millennium Docs Against Gravity film festival in Poland, has secluded herself for some 20 years amidst a monumental forest near Minsk. If she is anything like Ida, it’s because she needs to delve into the past, understand it, and forgive in order to move on and see what lies ahead.

Likewise, having grown up in tumultuous times similar to Ida's, albeit in a different era, Vera finds herself indirectly affected by circumstances not explored in the film but pretty easy to surmise, given that her age aligns with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And she inevitably falls into the clutches of her own interpretation of those circumstances. Unlike Ida, however, she is neither chaste nor innocent, perhaps because she is a real person, rather than a fictional character. There’s a heavy burden on her shoulders that hinders her inner freedom – the guilty conscience of the penitent who has woken from a bad dream and is suddenly aware of the devastation it has caused around her.

Obviously immersed in the setting, Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson’s camera closely, yet still from a respectful distance, follows Vera’s daily routine in the monastery farm where she works, prays and helps the men in rehabilitation. We are eventually allowed to eavesdrop on conversations about their alcohol and drug addictions, and about the loved ones they lost along the way to the same substances, because there was no one to help them. Meanwhile, Vera opens up, too, and slowly discloses details of the deceitful love affair that gave her HIV and introduced her to heroin and the criminal world, only to leave her abandoned in the end, isolated in silence, and at the mercy of God and – seemingly more challenging – her own self-flagellating thoughts and feelings. Her intimate confessions are separated by long pauses in which the intensity of the words is offset by shots of soothing nature: the purifying whiteness of the snow and the tall trees reaching for the sky as if offering prayers to heaven. The quiet exterior hides inner dynamics, hinting that even in the most remote corners hidden away from civilisation, the human soul still carries a storm within.

It isn’t difficult to identify with the authors’ meditative experience. Absorbed by the spiritual environment, it seems that their goal wasn’t to tell a story, but rather to get a grip on an emotional process. The fascinating side of the otherwise loose narrative is the gradual revelation of Vera's personality and her motives for isolating herself as she peels the black veil from her body, layer by layer, until it is finally removed towards the end. The result is a film about self-forgiveness, which, of all the types of exoneration, turns out to be the most difficult.

Mother Vera was produced by UK-based company She Makes Productions.