 a film in three minutes into great silence. We're often used to films capturing our attention through fast edits and explosive dialogue, but not every subject demands such a noise-inducing cacophony in order to be appreciated. Sometimes films should be quiet, contemplative, and indeed almost invisible both to their subject and viewer, with one of the finest examples of this approach being the award-winning 2005 documentary Into Great Silence. Directed by German filmmaker Philipp Groening, the film documents the daily life of Carthusian monks in their monastery high up in the beautiful French Alps. And what follows is a mesmerizing and patient slice-of-life look at the ordered routine such people of faith live by over a six-month period shot in 2002 and 2003, which took two and a half years to edit and contains no musical score, voice-over commentary, nor any non-digetic sound in the mix. Groening originally approached the Holy Order about making the film in 1984 and was told by the monks they needed time to think about it. Sixteen years later, they finally gave him their answer and agreed to the shoot. The director uses only natural daylight throughout, helping to grant the film a timeless quality as the styles and fashions of the modern world pass by. The location is a character in its own right, with Groening's camera capturing beautiful vistas as the slow movement of time passes by with serendipitous effect. The film's subjects, seen at times posing for the camera silently in portraits, keep their distance from the filmmaker and yet at the same time provide a deeply intimate look at the contemplative relationship each monk has with their faith. The slow reveal of the monastery's way of life, from feeding cats to attending mass, humanizes these quiet, almost austere personalities and allows for some truly peaceful and heart-warming moments such as when a small group of monks enjoy the snow of winter. Into great silence or die große Stille in German may not provide any revelations on screen to the burning questions all religions have to contend with, but then again why should it? Cinema as an art form does not have to provide any answers to the subject a filmmaker chooses to tackle, it just has to explore them. The contemplative, ponderous nature of faith can't be explained away with dialogue or visual motifs in a medium such as filmmaking. But what integrate silence does offer is an up-close and yet paradoxically distant insight into what faith looks like for one particular sect of a religion and more importantly gives us pause to perhaps listen to the silence in our own lives and try to hear what is being said. For as the poet Rumi once wrote, listen to the silence, it has so much to say.