Welcome to Something Good, the arts and culture newsletter from The Conversation, which aims to cut through the noise and recommend the very best in new releases and events every fortnight. It's our off week but that doesn't mean nothing is happening in arts and culture.

I recently read Antonia Fraser's biography of Mary Queen of Scots and found myself intrigued by her faithful – and favourite – lady-in-waiting, Mary Seton, who returned to a convent in France after she left the service of the long-imprisoned queen. There, despite being a wealthy noblewoman, she lived a nun's life of poverty which gravely affected her health.

In Flora Carr's The Tower, a novel which imagines the Scots queen's captivity in Lochleven Castle in Kinross, it is suggested that the never-married Seton joined a convent less as religious sanctuary, and more as a sanctuary from men. Life for women in the 16th century held little prospect of agency, power or independence (even for queens), their lives subjugated to the will of men. Little wonder then, that some women might view the convent as a preferable place to live out one's days and serve God.

Nuns figure significantly in the European imagination, at times revered, at times lampooned and sometimes feared. There is no shortage of nuns featured in musicals, comedies, thrillers and horror films, from The Sound of Music and Sister Act, to Black Narcissus and The Conjuring. But in this constant portrayal of nuns as not of the real world and confined to fictional realms, they are stripped of their humanness, their lives disregarded and left unexamined.

When we do encounter real nuns in our everyday world, often we realise how unrealistic or unserious our expectations of them are, and how little we understand them or the lives they lead. Perhaps contemplating the life of a nun leads us to confront uncomfortable questions about our own purpose, and the way we find connection, community and fulfilment – and even a sense of peace. Now a new documentary, Mother Vera, prompts us to do just that.

Courtesy of PR

Directors Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson invite viewers into the intimate space of a young nun's cloistered life in a remote Belarus convent, as she examines the threads that have led her to this life and ponders the leaving of it. It is a world of silence and stillness, of ritual and contemplation, that can feel both repellent and seductive. 

Set against a stark and unforgiving landscape, the film is beautifully and at times dreamily shot. A mesmerising moment where Vera gallops through the snow on a white horse, black robes flowing behind her, feels like a scene from a 16th-century Breughel painting or an eastern European fairytale. But the dilemma faced by Vera is all too real as she struggles towards renewal and transformation.

Our reviewer Helen Hall, an Anglican priest herself, says the film "not only gives those watching space to react and reflect individually, it almost compels them to do so". For me, Mother Vera sounds like a calling that is hard to resist.

There have been some profoundly memorable documentaries made over the first quarter of the 21st century. Answer our poll to let us know which of the five we've chosen is your favourite. 

Last week we asked you about whether you believed in the idea of a "guilty pleasure" in relation to my colleague Anna's enjoyment of the reality show Love is Blind. It turns out that most of you (41%) think it's not so clear-cut, answering, "It's complicated, I'm proud and guilty about liking certain things."

Jane Wright
Commissioning Editor, Arts & Culture 

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