No Risk, No Gain: The Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia was the feature attraction of the 2025 Neumann Inspires Film Festival on April 4 and 5.

The documentary allows the Sisters to explain, in their own words, what it truly means to be a Sister of Saint Francis of Philadelphia and why the world needs their legacy now more than ever.

Two years ago, Sara McDermott Jain decided to tell the story of the Sisters, a 170-year-old order of Catholic nuns who founded Neumann University in 1965. The average age of those in the congregation is 84.

“I felt it was urgent to capture the stories in their own words,” says Jain, who was familiar with the Sisters through writing for Good News, the order’s magazine. “Here’s this group of people that has done so much good in the world. They are inspirational women with valuable lessons about how to live your life.”

Through the years since 1855, women in the congregation became hospital CEOs and college presidents, nursing professors and high school principals, always serving as champions of social justice for the poor and marginalized.

As an adjunct professor at Neumann in 2022, Jain suggested the idea of a documentary about the Sisters to Dr. Chris Domes. He shared her formal proposal with Sr. Kathy Dougherty, who secured a sponsorship for the project from Philip Goropoulos, president of CHI St. Joseph Children’s Health.

Since May of 2023, Jain has been employed by the university to produce the documentary and supervise the film festival. She interviewed 60 people for the film (including 40 Sisters), traveling from Pennsylvania and Maryland to Oregon and Washington with a brief trip to Assisi, Italy.

She amassed 4,000 pages of transcripts and wrote the script. Her first rough cut of the film ran for six hours and sent her into a ten-day cutting frenzy. The final edited version runs for one hour and forty minutes.

The theme of the film, she explains is “Having faith in moving forward with your goals and dreams. There were always challenges, but the Sisters always moved forward, using what they had and doing what they could do.”

Jain is a novelist (Wolves at Night), a screenwriter who has worked with more than 75 authors in adapting their books to films (To Kill an Alien, Chance, The Dawn, Foreign Nationals), and the founder of PRINDIE, the Princeton Independent Film Festival, which ran from 2015-2022.

Main photo caption: Sr. Diane Tomkinson appears in No Risk, No Gain.