The hush of sea wind, two women in habits who move through ritual with a kind of practiced grace. Nun’s Beach begins in stillness. Muriel glows, and her sister smiles: “Must be God’s love.” She isn’t wrong, only incomplete. Because Muriel is in love - with someone else - and that truth burns like sunlight behind stained glass: brilliant, contained, forbidden.

Directed by Kate diRienzi and starring Iris Rhian (Flora) and Claudia Thiedmann (Muriel), Nun’s Beach is a secret hidden inside another secret - an unforgiving yet tender story. It carries the paradox of love that must remain unseen: silent love, the purest kind. Only those who’ve known it can recognize its echoes.

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Iris Rhian (L) and Claudia Thiedmann as Sisters Flora and Muriel[/caption]

When Sister Flora visits Muriel's family she suffers with the weight of this secret. So she tries to blend in, to pray the feeling away, to let devotion swallow the pulse beneath her skin. Muriel tries too. Her family cannot see her - or perhaps chooses not to. And so the film asks: how can something so calm make so much noise? Their quiet isn't emptiness - it’s tension, longing, and guilt, folded together until they hum.

“I choose you,” Muriel says - her voice steady with conviction her actions can’t sustain. Flora is ready to burst, the silence between them stretched to breaking. Maybe no one chooses; maybe only love does. In the end, what saves her isn’t escape but a gentle intervention: the pure, disarming gaze of a child who, through a simple and familiar gesture of play, dissolves the tension. The rituals keep their rhythm, even as the world shifts beneath them.

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"My whole life, I’ve heard family folklore about these two nuns, the exact nature of their relationship ultimately deemed inconclusive" - diRienzi discussing the real-life inspiration behind her short[/caption]

Writer/Director diRienzi builds the film from her own family’s folklore: two nuns - her great-aunt and her lifelong companion - who lived together for fifty years. Out of that quiet mystery, she imagines a life where queer love and divine devotion coexist, not in opposition but in parallel, each sustaining the other. The result is less a transgression than a reconciliation, an homage, and an act of spiritual empathy that redefines what it means to be devoted.

Visually, Nun’s Beach unfolds with deliberate quiet: soft natural light, slow compositions, faces half-lit like icons. It is a film of breath and gesture, of hands that hover yet never quite touch. The restraint feels like prayer; the longing, like revelation.

How can a film so calm feel so loud? Perhaps because its silence refuses to hide. There is no plea for understanding here. Nun’s Beach offers homage instead - to love as inheritance, to the parts of ourselves too entwined to unmake. Sometimes the most radical act is not to resist, but simply to live.