This documentary observes daily life in a Benedictine monastery, exploring how personal needs and institutional priorities intersect within a cloistered religious community. Following monks engaged in labor, worship, communal meals, meetings, and routine chores, Wiseman's camera captures theological debates, generational conflicts, personal frustrations, and moments where collective silence and devotion intersect. The film offers a calm, multilayered reflection on faith and discipline, examining the balance of monastic life through the intersection of individual struggles and communal commitment.

 Fifty years ago, at the height of America’s communal-living movement, Frederick Wiseman turned his camera to a quieter setting: an Episcopal monastery in Michigan devoted to service and to the sacred. Departing from the charged environments of his earlier films—mental hospitals, high schools, police precincts—Essene offers a calm, measured portrait of monastic life. Structured around the Benedictine principles of study, prayer, and labor, the film records the monks’ daily routines and the intricate social interactions that sustain them. It observes how individual needs are reconciled with the monastery’s priorities, and how the monks navigate issues familiar to any community: rules, worship, values, love, and work. In doing so, it captures the delicate balance between personal devotion and collective life.

Shot in a pure cinéma-vérité style, Essene is at once a record of a cloistered existence and a meditation on the nature of all institutions. Without sentimentality or forced piety, Wiseman reveals a humility and reverence that emerge organically from the rhythms of the place. Quiet, frank, and deeply human, it remains one of cinema’s most profound and insightful works on religious life.

• ProducerFrederick WISEMAN
• Cinematography Bill BRAYNE
• Edit Frederick WISEMAN
• Sound Frederick WISEMAN

Zipporah Films​​