TIFF50
At its TIFF world premiere, Nuns vs. The Vatican did not play as quiet reportage. It struck like testimony delivered in public court. The audience shifted in their seats as former nuns spoke of abuse not just by individuals but by an institution built to consecrate silence. Lorena Luciano’s 90-minute documentary, filmed in Italian, English, and Slovenian, is compelling not just for what it reveals, but for how it reveals complicity.
Luciano, working with producer Filippo Piscopo, follows the still-evolving court cases around allegations of sexual and psychological abuse inside the Vatican’s privileged corridors. Survivors like Gloria (now a former nun, speaking under her real name), and Miriam and Klara (protected by pseudonyms), step forward alongside pro bono lawyers, investigative reporters such as Federica Tourn, and advocates like Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org. The result is a mosaic of testimony, journalism, and legal record. But more than any document, the film is about the lived cost of silence.
Psychologists have long shown that survivors of institutional abuse are often silenced not simply by threat but by trauma itself. Betrayal trauma theory (Freyd, 1996) argues that when abuse is perpetrated by a trusted caregiver or authority, the mind may suppress or mute the experience to preserve some sense of attachment or survival. Silence is not weakness; it is adaptation. Nuns vs. The Vatican captures this paradox starkly. One participant explains that the abuse had so shattered her trust in humanity that she could not even sit with a therapist. The very structures of care became suspect. Therapy, a space of listening, was foreclosed because she no longer believed anyone could be trusted to hear her. Silence happens at the emotional and institutional levels of the victim’s very existence.
This is not merely testimony; it is an anatomy of silence. Luciano’s film shows how the voice can be broken long before it is heard, and how recovery requires not just courage but the slow rebuilding of trust itself.
The Catholic Church has been under the lens before. From Alex Gibney’s Deliver Us From Evil to Netflix’s The Keepers and the fictionalised newsroom heroics of Spotlight, the canon of clerical abuse documentaries is already weighty. What does Nuns vs. The Vatican add?
First, a shift of perspective. Where many films focus on the predator and the victim, Luciano expands the frame to include the bystander. As she puts it: “The ones who knew and didn’t say a word, we need to open the windows and look deeper inside, beyond the trappings.” By treating silence not as absence but as complicity, the documentary reframes the story from scandal to structure. This is not just about abusers, but about those who enabled them by choosing not to see.
Second, a linguistic and cultural breadth. Filmed across multiple languages, the documentary situates the abuse not as an isolated national scandal but as a transnational system, stretching from Italian convents to Vatican halls to global advocacy platforms. Where The Keepers was local, Nuns vs. The Vatican is systemic.
Third, an insistence on the survivors as agents of public record rather than passive victims. Even if, as a critic, one can argue that their voices remain mediated by the filmmaker’s frame, the film nonetheless stages them as witnesses in their own right, not as illustrative case studies.
Silence is not confined to survivors. Social psychology has long studied the bystander effect, the diffusion of responsibility when many know but none act (Darley & Latané, 1968). Luciano’s documentary pushes this into ecclesiastical territory: priests, bishops, nuns, and even families who “looked away” form the architecture of complicity. The Church is indicted not only for the acts committed but for the systemic tolerance of those acts. “When you take away the façade of beauty (and devotion), there are real lives being stripped of their freedom,” Luciano notes. It is a line that could serve as the film’s thesis.
If there is a critique to be made, it is that the survivors’ agency still arrives filtered through the director’s lens. Abuse silences by stripping away control, and cinema, even sympathetic cinema, cannot fully restore it. What we hear in Nuns vs. The Vatican is perhaps not yet a scream of autonomy but the first whisper of reclamation. That tension is itself part of the film’s power: it shows not only what has been taken, but what is in the slow process of return.
At TIFF, the audience did not watch passively. There were murmurs, gasps, and long silences of recognition. The film compelled not just attention but discomfort. And that is where its importance lies. This is not festival wallpaper or a righteous message film to be admired from afar. It is compelling viewing precisely because it unsettles the room, demanding that silence be broken not only on screen but among those who watch.
Verdict: Nuns vs. The Vatican is a necessary addition to the canon of abuse documentaries, expanding the frame from predator to bystander, from scandal to structure. It is a film that whispers of agency lost and reminds us that true justice will come only when that whisper becomes a roar.”
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