PixVox

I took a couple of hours this weekend to watch Into Great Silence, a documentary film directed by Philip Gröning that was first released in 2005. It’s the remarkable story of the everyday lives of Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, high in a remote corner of the French Alps (Chartreuse Mountains). The film was made 16 years after the director first requested permission to make it. Then he lived at the monastery for six months, and filmed all alone, behind the walls no ‘outsider’ had ever been allowed to enter before. The film is prayerful, enchanting and successfully taps into the basic human need for solitude.