Into the field

This film examines the everyday secular lives of nuns residing in the Romanian Orthodox monastery of Varatec. The majority of the 450 members of this monastery live as small groups in private houses, much like regular villagers, rather than inside the walls of the communal abbey. Throughout the year, they integrate their duties at home with their religious responsibilities to their community and to the church. By visually exploring the social aesthetics of the monastery, the film depicts certain aspects of the nuns' everyday, lived experiences. Instead of exclusively focusing on the spiritual qualities of monastery existence, it documents the secular aspects of the nuns' relationships, activities, and routines, and offers a glimpse into the concrete ways in which they negotiate their identities within the separate yet connected spaces of home and church. Brief periods of stop-motion animation are built into the film, intended as a reflexive meta-commentary on the often unpredictable and uncontrollable processes of ethnographic investigation.