Gardening With Soul (2013)
Sister Loyola is one of the liveliest nonagenarians you could ever meet. As the main gardener at the Home of Compassion in Island Bay, Wellington, her daily tasks include heavy lifting alongside vigorous spade and wheelbarrow work, which she sometimes performs on crutches. Loyola and the other Sisters of Compassion follow the vision of Mother Aubert to ‘meet the needs of the oppressed and powerless in their communities’.
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Filmed over four seasons at the Home of Compassion in Wellington, New Zealand, Gardening with Compassion, focuses on the life of ninety year old Sister Loyola Galvin, a nun in Mother Suzanne Aubert's Sister's of Compassion Roman Catholic religious order. Although having to get around on crutches or with cane at times, Sister Galvin enthusiastically tends to her gardening duties while extolling the importance of good compost and companion planting as she disperses pearls of wisdom and insights from her life. This is a simple but moving story of dedication and love from a woman who is both spiritual and practical, much as the founder of her order was. Technically, this is not the greatest cinematography that you will see, and I would have loved to have discovered more of Sister Loyola's interior spiritual life, but I respect her comment that such things can be difficult to put into words.
This film is a year in the life of an aging nun, and we learn much of her life story, her personal philosophy and much of it is put in context within her amazing love of gardening. She is an inspiration to many other folks, and is an engaging person to be with over the 100 minutes of this documentary. The film is divided into the four seasons of the gardens, and I felt that the order chosen was not random. The story is a gentle one, and the film moves along at a leisurely pace, appropriate for the nature of the material. There is one major criticism I had of the film - I found the cinematography very disappointing, and the hand-held work amongst the worst I have seen. (I think much of this was deliberate, but it did not work for me.) The corny use of soft focus, and the repetitive way it is done was also annoying. The director and producer really should have realized that this looked very amateurish, doing a disservice to the story.