As has been our custom over the past three years — we show a movie on the evening of Palm Sunday — next Sunday at 7 p.m.
This year we will be showing Of God’s and men.
It is about eight French Christian monks who live in harmony with their Muslim friends in a monastery perched in the mountains of North Africa, in the 1990s. When a crew of foreign workers is massacred by a religious fundamentalist group, fear sweeps through the region.
The army offers them protection, but the monks refuse. Should they leave? Despite the growing menace in their midst, they slowly realise that they have no choice but to …
This film is loosely based on the life of the Cistercian monks of Tibhirine in Algeria, from 1993 — 1996.
It is slow moving — heavy and inspiring, dark and enlightening all at once. One reviewer, Philip Martin, wrote:
… a movie that made me sad and proud to be human, to belong to a species capable of such cruelty and such kindness, and possessed of the power to choose to love those who hate us, and to die with peace in our hearts as the world burns down.
Another wrote: I can’t recall the last film that so wholly, honestly and movingly explained what it means to be a Christian.
Alan
