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Nearly 60 years ago, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart dramatically redefined what it means to be a nun in the Catholic Church. Now their story is being told in “Rebel Hearts,” a documentary premiering at Sundance that shows the part these nuns played in the second wave of feminism.

Director Pedro Kos, writer-producer Shawnee Isaac-Smith, and Immaculate Heart Sisters Lenore Navarro Dowling and Rosa Manriquez joined TheWrap’s Sundance Studio sponsored by Nfp and National Geographic to discuss the new film, which recounts how Anita Caspary, Mother General of Ihm back in the 1960s, fought against the conservative cardinal of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, James McIntyre, to establish their own college and high school, even dispensing their vows and creating a new organization outside the Catholic Church to continue their mission.

The Ihm nuns would continue to break the mold of cloistered life long held as the only form...

In 1965, the world’s idea of a problematic nun was Maria von Trapp: a black sheep in a white wimple who was booted from her convent for taking the odd hillside hike, enjoying a bit of a sing-along and ultimately getting jiggy with a handsome navy captain. By 1968, life had got a bit more complicated for misfit sisters, while a conflicted Catholic church struggled to contend with a decade of seismic social unrest. As civil rights and gender politics evolved, many brides of Christ found themselves torn between the advances of the outside world and the rigid patriarchy of the their church. Tracing the story of one particularly independent-minded group of Los Angeles nuns, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Pedro Kos’ accessible, moist-eyed doc “Rebel Hearts” neatly threads a global feminist awakening through the very specific experience of a few defiant, no-longer-cloistered women.

Premiering in Sundance’s U.

The last few months have seen a lot of revolutionary groups from the 1960s depicted on screen: the Yippies and the Students for a Democratic Society in “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” the Black Panthers in “Judas and the Black Messiah,” the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in “MLK/FBI” and now the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in “Rebel Hearts.”

And if you don’t think a group of Roman Catholic nuns quite belong on that roster of rabble-rousers, maybe Pedro Kos’ documentary will set you straight. The film, which premiered on the second day of this year’s virtual Sundance Film Festival, finds revolution in the strangest of places — a Catholic college for women and home for nuns in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles, part of which now serves as the headquarters of the American Film Institute, and part of which ended up in...