Mother Vera – BFI London Film Festival 2024

Directors: Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson

Shot largely in Minsk, Mother Vera is an absorbing, meditative documentary in black and white by Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson in which little is said, but much implied. Its effects are almost all in its strikingly cinematography, also by Embleton, and in a quiet procession of evocative sounds.

The film’s opening moments set the scene. A nun in a voluminous black habit prostrates herself on the floor of a chapel. The camera has been following her footsteps up staircases and along corridors. Here as throughout the film, the focus tends to be tightly on a detail, a section not the whole of a body. As the camera follows the black-clad legs into the chapel, there is the sound of whispering and glimpses of flickering candles.

We hear a church bell as thick snow falls. Gradually, without commentary, is becomes clearer that we are in Russian Orthodox monastery in winter. Only in the closing credits is the location given – it is a convent in Minsk in Belarus. Vera, the Mother Vera of the title, is a youngish nun – we hear she has been in the convent for twenty years. Like her fellow sisters, she is clad in distinctive tall headgear. The camera follows rituals as the women repeatedly bow and bless themselves, line up to kiss an icon or to take communion.

Vera’s still face gives little away: she is usually caught staring into the middle distance. Only occasionally do we hear her in voice-over, as for the most part, the film works by incidental sounds and silences. Much of the first section of the film, for instance, is haunted by the whistling winter wind. At first we see Vera interacting kindly with the local community. It’s too easy here to start to imagine a cheering narrative about transformative good works in far-flung places. But then there are unexpected scenes where the men in the nuns’ care – plain-spoken workmen, mostly it seems, former prisoners – express resentment at calls by a priest to extend charity to a newcomer they’ve taken a dislike to. It’s no idealised community, we realise.

Winter turns to spring, but it’s still pretty bleak. Vera, now outdoors, is still wrapped up against the weather. But a new mood appears as she tends with loving professionalism to the horses of the monastery farm. There are several mesmerizing scenes of Vera mounting and riding a grey horse. On one occasion she is cantering through deep snow in her flowing skirts. Her relationship with the horses seems profound. She whispers to them, lays her face against them, even, in one memorable scene, lies down with her head thrown back over a horse that has lain down to sleep.

But we also see her with her family. Her mother comes to visit and she spends Easter with her and her siblings. The scenes are unsentimental: Vera pitches in with the hard physical labour.

Only very gradually does Vera’s own story begin to emerge and it’s an unpredictably tragic one. Any fantasies we may have had about her having being a devout girl called to the religious life are put paid to. And it’s only in the final scenes where she suddenly appears in France, in the Camargue, that we see her without her veil and with tattoed shoulders and realise she has, without explaining, left her convent life behind.

Before this we have witnessed a strange ceremony. It takes place in a pool within the church itself. We’ve seen men queuing to bathe. Now the camera focuses on Vera herself as all alone before candle-lit icons, she steps into the steaming water, enacting what seems to be a compelling ritual of penance and absolution.

Again, truth is stranger than fiction. In France she is again working with horses, but she seems to be treated as a lowly employee, endlessly mucking out the stables. When she is invited to ride, her French employer criticises everything from her inadequate riding gloves to her posture. The language barrier seems insuperable, Vera unable to explain her deep knowledge and experience with horses.

Is she happy? She never articulates her feelings directly, but at the end talks of having found her “cornerstone.” The camera captures her arms gracefully sweeping through water. She seems to have arrived at a kind of peace.

Mother Vera is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.