ABOUT THE FILM

Convento is more than a film to watch.  Convento is a film immersion.  It does not simply document the ways and beliefs of its subjects, but rather invites the audience on a southern European sojourn to a place most new and most remarkable.  At the convergence of the rivers Oeiras and Guadiana, along what some believe to be a ley line possessing mystical energies, rises the four hundred year old monastery Sao Francisco.  Its light earthen walls, marked by the sun and time, house a labyrinth of terraces, courtyards, gardens and fountains, all offering secret places to contemplate.  An ancient irrigation system delivers water throughout, a silvery artery connecting all life.  The monastery is surrounded by a surrealist storybook landscape, an amalgam of desert palms and cacti and a forest’s darker, cooler life, within which animals of all kinds secretly contemplate.  Undated ruins still have footings, their mysteries very much vigorous.  Originally built to house pieces from Christ’s crucifix, it is now home and creative laboratory to Geraldine, Christiaan, and Louis Zwanikken.  They are a family, to be sure, but also three separate “entities,” each creating their own mythology and each with a different realm in which to exist.  

Geraldine and her late husband Kees, and her two sons, Christiaan and Louis, left Holland in 1980, trading a life of comfort and convenience for a monastery in ruins.  A former dancer with The Dutch National Ballet Company, Geraldine left Holland to pursue a “dream,” having grown weary of the repetitious monotony of classical choreography.  She is a painter, sculptor, and tireless tender of numerous edible gardens, from which she eats something daily.  While she has stopped performing, she has never stopped moving.  Louis is the caretaker and guide at the convento.  He walks with the animals and all who visit, and they with him, faithful comrade on the monastery grounds.  “We make this place beautiful.”  Once a house of worship, there is a chapel now converted and dedicated to Christiaan’s work.  A kinetic artist, he rescues the skulls and bony remains of the expired indigenous wildlife from an eternity of sun-dried decay, and then reanimates them with bodies of servomechanism.  He creates a “tension” between Nature’s machinery and man-made machinery.  As motors hum and whir, his bio-mechanicals walk, talk, and fly, once again breathing new breath.  They may be fleshless, but certainly not lifeless.  Christiaan’s engineering feats for the monastery are as beautiful as they are practical.  He resurrected a derelict waterwheel that is now the leviathan heart of the aqua system.  It is true functioning art.  

Director Jarred Alterman shepherds the audience to this inspirational sanctuary, leading them by the eyes.  Throughout the film’s body he weaves micro-narratives:  scenes that are uniquely lit, filmed, edited, and scored, fortifying each with its own personality, and the Zwanikkens with their own personal visual diaries.  Concentric narrative threads binding one film, all centered on a monastery turned artistic and spiritual retreat.  The audience is not merely watching a documentary.  The audience is being transported to a new destination.  A new world is being introduced and a fantasy is created, documentary or not.  Unlike rigid “sit-down” interviews, which require the audience to shift their concentration, the Zwanikken’s interviews are almost entirely “in-scene,” preserving the pace and emotion of the fantasy. They share their existential thoughts on the coexistence of life and art and the incredible place in which they live.  Alterman’s concern for an honest and faithful representation of this incredible place is obvious.  His frames have the composition, color, and complexity of paintings, except his move.  Not one fountain’s spray or one sculpture’s gaze unfelt, not one birdsong unheard.  He creates an intoxicating serenity through motion, allowing the audience to meditate upon what they are seeing and hearing as it is happening.  His slow, graceful camera movement and use of point of view is so absorbing, that all who watch Convento will walk upon the same tile and stone as the abbot once walked. 

Follow the river to Convento.