In 1982 Paolo Dall'Oglio, an italian Jesuit, decides to bring back to life the ruined syrian monastery of Mar Moussa and make it a place of dialog between Christians and Muslims. Mar Moussa became a symbol of peace in a region devasted by war. In 2013, during the war, Paolo disappeared. What would become of Mar Moussa?

Director Biography

After a year of at Brown University and a postgraduate research degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Justine Malle, daughter of late french director Louis Malle, interned in a parisian publishing company and translated into french texts by Greil Marcus and Jonathan Rosenbaum. In 2003, after an internship on a movie by Anne Fontaine, she directed a short documentary called “Shanghai notes” and in 2004 anoher short documentary called “Light in April”. In 2006 and 2008, she directed two short fiction films called “Cet été-là” and “Surpris par le froid”. In 2011, she made her first feature length fiction called “Youth”, selected in Rome, San Francisco, Cleveland, London, Montreal, Copenhaguen, Shanghai film festivals in 2013. From 2014 to 2018, she worked on a script for her second feature film, “Les Grands bois”, with an Austria-Luxembourg production company, which has not yet been directed. In 2020, she came back to documentary film making with a project about a monastery in Syria dedicated to interreligious dialog, which became “Mar Moussa”, finished in October 2024.

Director Statement

I knew from the beginning of this documentary that it would be about a place, Mar Moussa, in all of its dimensions: spiritual, esthetic, human… What first struck me about this monastery, as it strikes everyone who goes there, was the beauty of the desert landscape it is set in and the extraordinary quality of its church’s medieval frescoes. 

But Mar Moussa does not interest me only as an archeological site or a moment of eastern art history, but because it inspired Paolo Dall’Oglio the crazy project of restoring it to make it a place of hospitality and Islamic-christian friendship in a Middle-East ridden with interreligious conflict. His goal, in restoring a christian monastery that had prospered during 14 centuries of Islamic rule, was to remind the Syrians of their common cultural background, to remind them that what Syrian Muslims and Syrian Christians share (langage, art, customs, the tradition of hospitality) is much deeper than what separates them. 

Yet the central theme of this film is less interreligious dialog per se or the Syrian cultural heritage of the past than an existential drama playing out today. What I wanted to show was the courage with which, after the Syrian civil war, after the kidnapping and disappearance of Paolo Dall’Oglio, its founder, the community of Mar Moussa continued, in 2023, to carry out his message of peace and reconciliation.