Parity Pipeline

Genre

Synopsis

In Present-day San Francisco, amid skyrocketing property values, growing tent cities, drone surveillance and civil unrest, THE SISTERS OF SAINT VERONICA serve the area’s most downtrodden populations. Their small convent on Guerrero is led by a strategic Mother Superior. Taking advantage of the neighborhood’s new upscale tastes, she turns the convent’s thrift store into a thriving vintage enterprise. With the help of a stylish millennial employee, Shue, they generate enough surplus “discretionary funds” to support Dolores, the convent’s “votive,” (holy whore) without attracting the attention of the Vatican. While the sisters tend to society, Dolores tends to the sisters, aiding them in the ancient practice of Erotomancy—divining by orgasm. Dolores is a former sex-worker and carryover from the neighborhood’s heyday as a dyke haven. Freed from the pressures of “making a living,” she lives in a state of constant prayer, turning tasks of daily upkeep into ritual. Each night, as she brings a different Sister to ecstasy— ancestors, angels and gods appear to them armed with prophesies of reckoning and redemption. Dolores’ devotion to non-reproductive work and pleasure envisions a utopic alternative to capitalist relations. But there is trouble in paradise: when the oldest nun in the order, Sister Kathryn, is found molesting a student, she justifies her crime as “charity” and threatens to expose the order’s secrets. Mother Superior must confront the skeletons in her own closet if she is to defend sex as sacred, and bring accountability to the culture of abuse within the Church.