During this Year of Consecrated Life, you are invited to an evening hosted by St. Joseph & Sons. Author and filmmaker Abbie Reese will share a collaborative work – a feature-length film-in-progress made with and focused on Rockford’s Poor Clare Colettine nuns.
7 p.m. Thursday, November 5
Field Fastener | 9883 N. Alpine Road | Machesney Park, IL 61115
Light refreshments will be served. Video footage will be shown.
Chosen (Custody of the Eyes) will form a portrait, through self-scrutinizing video recordings, of a 28-year-old former blogger and painter confronting what she believes is her calling: Becoming a cloistered contemplative nun in one of the strictest religious orders.
The feature-length documentary focuses on “Heather” as she transitions into a new identity – “Sister Amata” – one of the newest members following the 800-year-old religious rule. (She selected the aliases to reflect the Poor Clare Colettine value of anonymity and hiddenness.)
Abbie Reese arranged to meet Heather in 2005, when Abbie first started working with the Poor Clares in Rockford and Heather was beginning to discern her vocation to religious life. Heather joined the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford in 2011. One of the strictest orders, the nuns observe monastic silence and make vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and enclosure. Granted permission to lend the nuns video cameras so that the film would be documented from their perspectives, this collaborative work – a “visual dialogue” – will allow viewers a unique encounter with a remote world.
Abbie is author of Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns (published by Oxford University Press in 2014)).
For more information about Chosen, please visit www.chosenthefilm.com
No comments:
Post a Comment