Cannes winner had ‘monastic adviser’ on set

OF Gods and Men, the Cannes Film Festival grand prize-winning feature now debuting across the United States, had a “monastic adviser” on the set to help faithfully depict the lives of the French monks whose story is at the heart of the movie.

Henry Quinson, who lived for six years at a Cistercian monastery in France, knew two of the monks portrayed in the film.

The subject matter is not typical for a movie: the lives of seven Trappist monks in turmoil-ridden Algeria in the mid-1990s. All seven were kidnapped in 1996 and ultimately beheaded.

“It’s very difficult for me to make a movie that would be cheap – the kind of movie that would only be about blood,” Quinson told Catholic News Service in a Feb. 18 telephone interview from Marseilles, France, where he lives. “It would be very far away from the spirit of the people I knew.”

Xavier Beauvois, who directed and co-wrote Of Gods and Men, approached Quinson after seeing his memoir on monastic life; Quinson had earlier translated into French and English-language book on the murdered monks.

Quinson said Beauvois e-mailed him asking, “I need someone to be with me on this movie. … When it’s written (in the script) ‘the monks pray,’ how are they dressed? What do they do? Do they sing? I need someone who knows the monastic life from the inside.”

Quinson, who had been considering making a movie himself on the French Trappists, agreed to help Beauvois.

“My little job,” Quinson said, “was to tell their story, … be faithful to the brothers, and reach out to as many people as we can.”

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