Outside the City

'Outside the City' documents the lives and deaths of the monks living behind the walls of a closed monastic community, as they transition from dairy farming to brewing the UK's first Trappist beer, the world famous Tynt Meadow. Director Nick Hamer spent a year with the Trappist monks of Mt St Bernard Abbey, gaining privileged access to document their hidden lives. They have turned their backs on the material, consumer society, to focus instead on contemplative spirituality, and to maintain an age-old religious tradition. Life and death in a monastery. An absorbing documentary about a cloistered community, men who have given up everything in pursuit of an ideal.