Even today, they spend their lives in silence: the monks in the Carthusian order. The French/Swiss/German film Die große Stille (Into Great Silence) (2005) offers a unique insight into everyday life in the Carthusian monastery Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps, where no visitors are allowed. The director, Philip Gröning, shared the monks’ lives for several months to be able to make this exceptional movie. The film is unusual in that it has hardly any dialogue, and only the Gregorian hymns of the monks at prayer are heard. “If silence is the music of the soul, the German director Philip Gröning has succeeded in making it ‘audible’”, claimed De Morgen. In 2006, this ode to silence was nominated as the best documentary film for the German Film Prize and won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, the largest American festival of independent film.
