INTO GREAT SILENCE
Germany, 2005 (Documentaries)
Into Great Silence was winner of a Special Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.Nestled in the French Alps, the Grand Chartreuse monastery is home to the Carthusian Order, one of the most strict and reclusive orders of Roman Catholic monks. Eschewing outsiders, the order has never been photographed or filmed until now.Philip Gröning had to wait 13 years for permission to film inside the monastery and, even then, he wasn’t allowed a camera crew – he had to enter alone. Into Great Silence is the result of six months spent living among the monks and observing their daily rituals, repeated across the turn of the seasons.With no commentary, no interviews, no score and no artificial lighting, this is documentary film stripped of its usual devices and the result is an apt meditation (of close to three hours) on the tranquility and stillness of life within the monastery; perhaps a tonic for our noise-filled times.
(extracted from melbournefilmfestival.com.au)

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Caught this film screened at the Melbourne Film Festival last night. It started at 9pm and ended close to midnight, drenched in silence and harbouring little if any form of unnecessary editing or the visual pillage. The director followed the cycle of seasons and accompanied a novice and the community on their daily activites, from the cell all the way to the church and into the gardens. windbells, stone-steps, sundown, plain breads, frostsnow, nightingale, streamlines, rosary, pine cones, chapel walls, votive lights, vespers, planting, sowing , playing, salt, celery sticks, cleaning, sewing, living and dying...all these in deep, intense, intimate and profound knowledge of what it means to give up everything to be a disciple of Christ. The cell becomes an enclosure of hidden prayer, in union with a hidden God who in turn remains in solid faith with other captives around the world, be it prisons, homes or asylums which do not touch the garment of salvation. One more life is saved because of the monk's mysterious sacrifice of love, given solely to God who is free to love and tend the soul in his loving disposal and embrace. Fidelity and radical love. Mystery to a rare calling. Fools to others and sanity for a lost world.

http://www.parkminster.org.uk/