Filmed over five years, "The Monastery" is the story of an 82-87 year old Danish man who is donating Hesbjerg, a castle he purchased 50 years earlier for this purpose, to the Russian Orthodox Church to use as a monastery.
Pernille Rose Grønkjær has made a fascinating portrait of an interesting man, Mr. Vig, and his dealings with the Moscow Patriarchate through a headstrong nun, Sister Ambrosija.
There is the bureaucratic aspect, keeping the castle as part of the estate in a trust after he dies and who will be on the board, the disrepair of the castle, the ecumenical problems of turning a room into a chapel and the personality problems of two very stubborn people of faith.
I wish that Ms Grønkjær had told more of the back story of Mr. Vig. People who did not attend the Q&A will find they are missing valuable pieces of his story - so I'll tell you some of them here. Vig trained as a Lutheran minister but because he was single was discriminated against. His spiritual search took him into Orthodoxy and Buddhism concurrently.
What we know about Vig is what he tells us, he never really loved anyone except his father, he judged people by their noses, he only recalled kissing his mother once and the like. This fairly antisocial, rather odd looking man is, however vibrant and interested.
I would also like to have an idea of what the Russian Orthodox population in Denmark is. Though it is small enough not to be mentioned in the CIA World Factbook (one of my favorite reference sources) online.
The movie moves a little slowly for my taste, but is so beautifully filmed, and the people are so interesting that I can't complain too much about the tempo.
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