A small community of French Cistercian monks in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria must decide whether to stay or flee as Islamist violence escalates around them in the 1990s. Beauvois films their communal life — prayer, medicine, harvest — with contemplative quietness before the crisis sharpens into an impossible moral choice. Based on the true story of the Tibhirine monks, it is one of the most profound and humane films about faith under pressure that European cinema has produced.
