Director: Rob Ryan
Starring: Christine Meeusen and members of the community of the “Sisters of the Valley”, as themselves
Distributor: Icon Films
Runtime: 87 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2019

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Rating notes: Mature themes, drug use and coarse language

This American film tells the story in documentary style of a group of women who see their mission as providing cannabis to those in medical need. It is not to be confused with a 1964 film, titled, “Breaking the Habit”, which is about the pitfalls of cigarette smoking.

In the town of Merced, California, USA, a pseudo-community of activist-nuns run a farm that grows cannabis illegally. A young wife, Christine Meeusen, who has corporate experience behind her, felt betrayed by a bigamist husband and fled from him penniless after 17 years in the relationship. After discovering the profit-making business of cannabis-farming, she adopted the persona of a nun under the name of Sister Kate, and founded an order she called, “Sisters of the Valley”, to set up a business to sell and distribute cannabis for medicinal purposes. Not surprisingly, Sister Kate ran the gauntlet with the county sheriff, black-market profiteers, local drug cartels, and the State of California’s Bureau of Medical Cannabis Regulation. Christine Meeusen was a rebel, a strong feminist, and militantly fought for the cause she believed was right.

It is important to realise that Sister Kate and her followers were not Catholic nuns. She formed a  “group of serious women on a serious mission”. Christine Meesen saw her faked identity as protecting her real persona, and thought that it sensitised others to someone who could be perceived as offering help.

The group Meeusen formed was one where its members looked like they belonged to a religious order. The film is confronting in showing women dressed as nuns plying the cannabis trade. They are shown smoking marijuana, as well as farming it, and toting guns to defend themselves. If one can step away from the masquerade, it is clear that those who joined the group of activist women were dedicated to do something to cope with the pain and suffering they saw in others. As a documentary, it is based on a real group of women, but as a film, it is patchy movie-making. Its impact is mostly reliant on the force of its visuals – nuns, who aren’t nuns, act like nuns, and behave in a social-activist way; the “nuns” get high on what they grow, and shock in what they say and do. The film uses archival footage clumsily, the editing is loose, character analysis is skimpy, but its visuals have force.

This is a film that requires one to lay aside any preconception about how a religious-looking community is expected to behave. It is interesting, because its events are factual. It scandalises only to the extent that one accepts at times that their identity looks real, even though the viewer knows it is not. The women fake being religious, because they think they can better help others that way. As Sister Kate says, “we will not have discussions about Jesus Christ”.

Each member of “The Sisters of the Valley” believes cannabis is a God-given plant that has therapeutic and healing properties. This review is not the place to evaluate that position, but the movie carries a strong message about the impact of members of a pseudo-religious community going about their business exactly as a group of lay people might choose to do. They “grow it and take (their) chances”. The film picks up pace in its final moments as “The Sisters of the Valley” fight for their legal rights to be recognised, and Sister Kate turns her attention formally to solving the legal problem of her “right to grow”. One can’t help but admire her pluck and fighting spirit, regardless of the claims being made about the plants that she farms.

This is an unusual, controversial documentary that is interesting to watch, but it is a film that asks the viewer to lay aside the shock value of seeing people dressed as nuns behaving as lay people might in the same circumstances. However, the documentary leaves no doubt in the viewer’s mind that Sister Kate and her followers are motivated to try and help people they see in need.

Peter W. Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting