Life at the Grande Chartreuse monastery, nestled deep within the French Alps, has remained virtually unchanged for almost a thousand years. Following their motto, “The Cross is steady while the world is turning,” these Carthusian monks live entirely in silence and are even cloistered from one another. In 1984, German filmmaker Philip Gröning sought permission to document their solitary life. “It is not time,” came the terse reply. Sixteen years later, however, the doors were opened. Gröning wandered unfettered through the monastery, recording the lives of these devout men using natural light and pretty much nothing else: no score, no voice-over, no archival footage. The result is a film of almost shocking gravity, and, at nearly three hours, it is perhaps a tonic for our fast, information-clogged life.
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