One of the things about working at a film festival is that you don’t always have the opportunity to watch the films at the festival.  That was the case when I worked at the NY Film Festival back in September and why I wasn’t able to see the well received film, Of Gods and Men.

Opening in NY and LA on February 25th, director Xavier Beauvois has assembled an excellent cast for this “quietly powerful” film…or so I hear.  The film stars Lambert Wilson, Michael Lonsdale, Olivier Rabourdin, Philippe Laudenbach, and Jacques Herlin.  I suggest you check out the trailer below because it is quite good for a drama of this caliber.  Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

Eight French Christian monks live in harmony with their Muslim brothers in a monastery perched in the mountains of North Africa in the 1990s. When a crew of foreign workers is massacred by an Islamic fundamentalist group, fear sweeps though the region. The army offers them protection, but the monks refuse. Should they leave? Despite the growing menace in their midst, they slowly realize that they have no choice but to stay… come what may. This film is loosely based on the life of the Cistercian monks of Tibhirine in Algeria, from 1993 until their kidnapping in 1996.