Diary of a Bride of Christ by Marta Smerechynska
DESCRIPTION OF A FILM:
For young girls who choose to become Brides of Christ, their lives are full of God's love. The nuns see its manifestation in everything, like in the removal of their hair and renunciation of their names. There are twelve Ukrainian girls - future nuns - with newly obtained crosses in a remote village in Transcarpathia, near the border between Ukraine and Romania. There is a large-scale celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Argentinean congregation in Ukraine as well as a gathering of hundreds of nuns from all over the world on St. Peter's Square in Rome. Above all, there are days of absolute silence but mostly –– of intimate stories from the nuns about the emergence to their vocation. What is it like to be a Bride of Christ? And what is it like to be a director of the film about these brides if your younger sister is one of them?
This film is a result of a year-long in-depth observation of the life of the film director's sister and other nuns – the Brides of Christ – in a modern Catholic monastery in Western Ukraine.
SEE TRAILER:
Marta Smerechynska
a documentary filmmaker and actress.
EDUCATION:
› National I. K. Karpenko-Kary Theatre, Cinema and TV University in Kyiv
› Participant of the international documentary filmmaking exchange with the Polish-French Film Academy Kinographe in Grenoble.
› Marta has been exploring an actor’s component in human nature in cinema and theatre for eight years. But the desire to turn her observation into cinematic form drove her into film directing. For the second year now she has been filming the female convent in Western Ukraine where her younger sister is a nun.