The Monastery

Colour, 35 mm
Denmark, 2006, 84 min
Section: Another View

Synopsis

Mr. Vig, an 82-year-old bachelor, has never known love but has always followed his heart, and he has never given up on his 50-year-old romantic dream. Fifty years ago, Jorgen Lauersen Vig bought the castle of Hesbjerg in the Danish countryside with the intention of building a monastery here. Now, in his declining years, he wants to make his dream a reality. He offers the castle to the Russian Orthodox Church, and a delegation of nuns is coming to view it. The nuns however have plans of their own that dramatically alter Mr. Vig’s life. He realises that the road to fulfilling his dream is completely different from what he had initially imagined...

About the director

Pernille Rose Grønkjær (b. 1973, Denmark) graduated in documentary film direction from the National Film School of Copenhagen in 1997. A year later she debuted with the hour-long documentary Those Were the Days (1998). Other selected works include the half-hour documentary film Repeating Grandpa (Min morfar forfra, 2001) and the television series A Complicated Family Life (Det komplicerede familieliv, 2004) and The Family (Familien, 2005). For her feature length documentary The Monastery she was awarded Joris Ivens Award at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival.