Young Ukrainian filmmaker Marta Smerechynska is the daughter of a priest and the sister of a nun. “From early childhood, I was observing nuns. This phenomenon was very interesting and strange for me. I question myself a lot why they were choosing this way [of life]. As a child, I even had a fear that maybe it is my vocation too.”
As it turned out, it was Nastia, the director’s sister, who took the vow of silence, not her. Marta’s film about Nastia, Diary Of A Bride Of Christ, screens in Documentary Competition in Sarajevo this week.
Strangely, when the director started work on the project, she at first tried to keep her family out of it. She made an initial short video which made no mention of Nastia. In hindsight, she thinks that she didn’t accept her sister’s choice and therefore didn’t want to include her. “When I started working on the film, I didn’t totally understand why I was starting to do it. I just felt that I had to do it,” Marta reflects.
When she was 16 years old, Marta left her family to go to university. She had the early ambition of becoming an actor. This was also the time when her sister Nastia first went to the convent.
There had always been a difference between the sisters. From earliest childhood, Marta had had a restless, curious mind. She questioned everything she didn’t understand. For example, she wasn’t sure she believed in God. Nastia, though, was much more “accepting.”
Making the film helped Marta understand both her father and her sister better.
Nuns have long been a staple of exploitation cinema and lurid art house movies. From Ken Russell’s The Devils to Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan Of The Angels, Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta to Pedro Almodovar’s Dark Habits, filmmakers have persisted in showing nuns as being eccentric or hysterical or sexually repressed. That is not at all how they come across in Marta’s documentary. We see them as hard working, but also as contented, playful and at ease with the world.
Marta spent time in the convent even before shooting started and remembers feeling very comfortable there. “When I started filming, it was strange how this place changed to me,” she remembers. One question nagged at her. Why would these young girls at the start of their adult lives, with all such different opportunities open offer to them, choose to cloister themselves away and take religious vows?
“I talked a lot with them and tried to understand every story – the story of every girl, every nun, every vocation.”
The young nuns have a strong sense of community. They are together all the time, from morning until night. They sleep in one room. They pray together. They work together. They eat together. “For me, this would be hard. Like every person, I need time to be alone,” Marta observes of the oppressively close knit and communal lives of her subjects. The nuns never seemed to be unhappy or to have big swings of mood. They were always smiling.
“Maybe I chose the wrong career!” Marta exclaims as she remembers her sister’s air of continual contentment. She discovered, though, that it was one of the rules of the convent that the nuns “had to be happy.” They put a lot of effort into remaining permanently cheerful.
“For me as a filmmaker, it was hard,” Marta says of the challenge of trying to make a film about a group of people who seemingly never get upset or have arguments. Where is the dramatic tension in that?
Marta sees obvious parallels between her own vocation, as a storyteller and filmmaker, and that of her sister. ”Of course, every profession, if you are really into it, you have a big passion about it.”
Nastia was in Ukraine at the start of the Russian invasion in February. Her convent was near a military base. For several months, she was working in a shelter helping war victims and displaced people. She has recently returned to Rome to complete her religious studies.
Marta was in Kyiv when the war started and eventually began to make a documentary set on the Polish-Ukrainian border and focusing on women forced to leave their homes.
“Firstly, I didn’t want to film anything because I didn’t accept that this [the invasion] is happening. But then I had to go to Poland for some days. I was for 10 hours queue at the border during the night, in the cold. I was together with all these women. In that moment, I felt I wanted to film it.”
DocuDays UA, the human rights festival in Ukraine, has given her some support for the project (yet to receive a title). Marta, who has been studying at renowned French film school Femis, is now in Paris and is working on a short doc. She has also been completing her masters programme at the graduate programme, Doc Nomads.
And, yes, Nastia has now seen the documentary. “It was a very hard moment for me…I was very scared to show her this film,” Marta acknowledges of showing the film to her sister. “For her, it was just – big nostalgia. It depends on what you believe as to how you see the film. When she was watching, she was very happy. The film became a connection between my world and her world.”
