A Sister’s Song

One film sows another. The seed of this documentary was a fortuitous encounter that occurred in an Orthodox monastery in Greece as she was shooting her film, The Patriarch's Room. There, Danae Elon meet Tatiana, a nun, and later on, her sister Marina, who becomes a central part of this next film. Tatiana, a subtle, mysterious, and introverted being,  is "worthy of being a fictional character.”

The documentary depicts an encounter between two discordant worlds tied together with a thread of profound sisterly love that exists in the shadow of a fatal certainty: the sisters’ universes will remain alien to one another. Elon strays away from any sensationalism in her subject matter, as well as any form of condemnation of Tatiana, Sister Jerusalem’s, choices. It is there that, quite precisely, the complexity of this documentary project resides–and its finesse: how to penetrate the intimacy of Sister Jerusalem who perceives it a sin to confess to any person other than her spiritual father? It is an arduous task to pierce her shell in order to encounter the vulnerabilities that make her human.    

The discreet eye of the filmmaker, skillfully enmeshed with that of her camera, as if in the background, is added to this complex relationship. For Marina, this complicit eye will give her the necessary means to undertake this journey towards her sister.  

There is no moral to the story, only the trajectory matters: a strong structure that honours the fundamental questions in all of their nuance and subtlety. The strength of the work lies in the open end of the film, one not easy to swallow, nonetheless, and one that has earned the film much criticism.

Gabrielle Ouimet
Tënk's Artistic Director

Bonus