A documentary by Bari Pearlman. Unrated. Plays Monday and Tuesday, February 18 and 19; Thursday, February 21; Monday, February 25; and Wednesday and Thursday, February 27 and 28, at the Vancity Theatre

A whole subcategory of documentaries celebrates the exotic world of Tibetan monks: the pageantry of red robes set against starkly beautiful plateaux, the haunting sounds of horns and chanting. Daughters of Wisdom serves up more of the same but with a new twist. It focuses on a remote monastery for Buddhist nuns on an eastern Tibet plateau called Kala Rongo, an oddity in a place where religious service has long been the domain of men.

Director Bari Pearlman chooses to document the nuns’ daily life with an unhurried, subdued approach. Brief interviews amid the yak-herding, brick-making, and prayer-wheel–spinning subtly reveal her subjects as quiet rebels. Their religious retreat allows them an escape from a society where women are kept illiterate, carry most of the burden of labour, and risk death in the face of some of the highest childbirth-mortality rates in the world. It also provides them with food and shelter in a desolate and poor region. And yet there is suffering to their chosen path as well: each nun must undertake a three-year bout of solitude, wherein she sleeps sitting cross-legged in a tiny “meditation box”.

But these are not issues Pearlman takes head-on. Similarly, the Chinese oppression of Tibetan culture is mentioned in a few passing intertitles. Daughters is mostly an unadulterated ethnographic study of what is likely a disappearing way of life. The most revealing footage isn’t of the picturesque monastery itself but of a few of the nuns buying food in the nearest town: even there, in their robes amid the motorbikes and bustling marketplaces, they seem like visitors from a faraway world.