The Vigil
2020 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Christine Chevarie-Lessard
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Confined in her room in a seniors' home where fourteen fellow nuns have died of COVID-19, Marguerite Paquin draws on prayer and solidarity, recalling forty-seven years of work on Quebec's Côte-Nord.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most pandemic docs are either apocalyptic or inspirational—this one just sits in a room with an old nun and lets dignity be enough, which somehow feels more radical than any formal experiment could manage.
Chevarie-Lessard positions this within the documentary tradition of intimate witness—the kind of observational restraint that recalls Agnès Varda—where fourteen deaths become a chorus rather than a spectacle, and the formal choice to stay confined mirrors Marguerite's own frame.
The decision to let Marguerite's hands do most of the talking—the rosary, the writing, the gesture—transforms what could be static into something unbearably present; it's a low-budget intimacy that only works because Chevarie-Lessard trusts us to see without cutting away.