Religion & Film: Of Gods and Men
In 1996, during the Algerian Civil War, seven monks of the Tibhrine monastery in Algeria (belonging to the Roman Catholic Trappist Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance) were kidnapped. The film of Gods and Men is based on that event and follows the lives of French Catholic monks in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria in the 1990s. As the country is caught into a terrible civil war between an oppressive secularist state and radical Islamists, the Trappist monks face the question of how to ‘love thy neighbour’ even when he points a gun at you.