So far the best movie I’ve seen at the 37th Telluride Film Festival is
Of Gods and Men. It was an unexpected pleasure from a slow,
deliberately paced film that built tension scene by scene, word by word,
look by look to the point where one expected and would have entirely
forgiven the characters dying from heart attacks before meeting their
historical ends.

The movie is a dramatization of the 1996 kidnapping and assassination of
the monks of Tibhirine, a French Trappist monastery in the Atlas
mountains of Algeria during the Algerian civil war. The conflict
between Islamic fundamentalists in Algeria and more moderate Muslims
started to boil over, and foreign corporate entities and remnants of
French colonial rule became targets.

News of atrocities committed against foreigners reached the monks and
forced them to decide between staying true to their mission and facing
likely death or fleeing the country.

The government of Algeria, the Algerian military, and people aware of
their plight urged them to leave, but the local population they had
served for decades urged the to stay. The monks ran a small infirmary,
the only medical care in the region, which made them essential to the
locals and soon nonjudgmental if not entirely willing allies of the
local insurgents–an uneasy alliance that turned the military against
them as well.

Historically, we know 6 of 8 monks in the monastery and a visitor from
the Trappist order were kidnapped, held for two months, and then
beheaded. The movie takes us through the almost unbearable tension that
built between the murder on the 14th of December, 1993 of 12 Christian
Croatian construction workers near the Monastery and the abduction on
the night of the 26th of March, 1996.

The movie leaves ambiguous the final fate of the monks in deference to
the controversy surrounding their actual fates. While it is clear they
were abducted by jihads, and they were beheaded, there is some
controversy as to whether the Algerian army may have killed them by
mistake while strafing a camp, and then covered the story up with the
beheading.

Each of the actors put in a powerful and compelling performance, but
Michael Lonsdale stood out as Luke Dochia, the doctor who had, in real
life, been in the monastery for 50 years, and was 82 at the time of the
abduction. Lionsdale and some of the other actors went on retreats to
prepare for their roles, learning the routines and liturgies of the
order first hand.

Highly recommended.