Of Gods and Men

Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux) won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2010 and the César for Best Film. The film consolidated Beauvois, after his earlier Don't Forget You're Going to Die and Le Petit Lieutenant, as a director engaged with morally serious institutional subject matter. The film is based on the actual events of the May 1996 abduction and killing of seven Cistercian-Trappist monks at the Notre-Dame de l'Atlas monastery in Tibhirine, Algeria, during the Algerian Civil War.

A small community of French Cistercian-Trappist monks led by their prior Christian de Chergé (Lambert Wilson) lives in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria, providing medical-and-agricultural support to the surrounding Muslim community. As Islamist violence escalates around them in the early 1990s (the GIA (Armed Islamic Group) campaign of murders against foreigners and Algerian government supporters) the brothers must collectively decide whether to stay at the monastery or flee back to France. Michael Lonsdale plays the elderly brother Luc, the monastery's doctor; Olivier Rabourdin plays Christophe.

Beauvois films the brothers' communal religious life (the divine office, the choral chanting, the daily monastery operations) across what is broadly several months of the deteriorating local-political environment. The famous Tchaikovsky Swan Lake dinner scene is among the most-cited single sequences in recent French religious cinema. The film operates simultaneously as religious-historical drama, study of contemporary North-African-Catholic monastic life, and meditation on what kind of moral commitment actually requires what kind of risk.