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Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film BAFTA 2011 Dir Xavier Beauvois / France / 2009 / 120 mins / Cert: 15A / Language: French

Starring: Lambert Wilson, Michael Lonsdale, Olivier Rabourdin, Philippe Laudenbach, Jacques Herlin and Loïc Pichon
       
Eight French Christian monks live in harmony with their Muslim brothers in a monastery perched in the mountains of North Africa in the 1990s. When a crew of foreign workers is massacred by an Islamic fundamentalist group, fear sweeps though the region. The army offers them protection, but the monks refuse. Should they leave? Despite the growing menace in their midst, they slowly realize that they have no choice but to stay... come what may. This film is loosely based on the life of the Cistercian monks of Tibhirine in Algeria, from 1993 until their kidnapping in 1996.

Brotherhood. Religions. Faith. Martyrdom. Love. French monks are living, working and praying in a catholic monastery in Algeria in the '90s civil war. Under threat by fundamentalist terrorists, they must decide whether to leave or stay. The film takes up universal values that, regardless of the god we believe in, cannot be repudiated. The work, which poses religious questions but is also universally spiritual, was based on real events that the director conceals until the very end, thereby strengthening the impact of his already powerful film.

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