The Little Sisters
1959 · 29m · Canada
Directed by Pierre Patry
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Micheline Robert chooses convent life over marriage, and the film follows her progress within a Hull religious community through to her final vows.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1959 NFB documentary about a woman taking vows sounds like the safest, most pious premise imaginable—except Patry somehow makes the interior life of renunciation feel like genuine drama, which is either deeply subversive or deeply boring depending on whether you're paying attention.
Patry's restraint here is exemplary: a film about spiritual commitment that trusts observation over intervention, situated firmly in the documentary tradition of mid-century institutional portraiture while maintaining an almost unfashionable tenderness toward its subject.
The decision to let silence and duration do the work—to film the ordinary rituals of convent life without editorial commentary or scored emotion—makes 29 minutes feel like an act of faith itself, and that choice is what makes it land.