Film's Description

The film tells us about a prominent tuberculosis specialist, professor of the Central Russian Tuberculosis Institute, who was known both as Valentina Puzik and Sister Ignatia.

This woman took the veil and the precepts of Orthodox elders during the fateful post-revolutionary years, when the authorities punished any kind of religious faith as a moral and criminal offence. Her lifelong undertaking was fighting against tuberculosis, a mortal illness at her times. That task was blessed by her spiritual father, Ignatiy (Lebedev).

Father Ignatiy was a “starets” from the oldest monastery in Russia, 'Zosimova Pustyn'. Here rich spiritual traditions and the elders’ spiritual guidance were maintained for centuries. Ignatiy was imprisoned in 1935, and died of illness in Stalin’s prison camps. With his prayers on Earth and in Heaven, however, he illuminated her “unclouded and joyful course of life” – that’s what Sister Ignatiya says.

The film is lyrical, without being sentimental or showing hagiographic intents. One of the most evoking leitmotifs are the narrow and poor stairs going up, the stairs the nuns had to climb to meet others like her secretly in an old attic.

The film’s plot develops from the live interview this outstanding woman released to the film director. We learn her public and secret life directly from her voice on the occasion of her 100th birthday. We cannot avoid to be impressed by her witty mind, her irony, her humbleness.

Pictures from her family photo albums as well as a rich selection of archival newsreels enrich the film.