Deir el-Muhraqa stands at the southeastern end of the Carmel range, at the point where the wooded ridge drops away towards the plain. The Carmelite monastery there marks the tradition, drawn from the Book of Kings, of the confrontation between the prophet Elijah and the prophets of Baal — an episode that has given the place its Arabic name, associated with sacrifice by fire. A stone statue of Elijah stands in the courtyard, and a narrow stair leads to a flat roof that offers one of the widest panoramas in the country: the Jezreel Valley, the hills of Galilee, Mount Tabor, and in clear weather the line of the Golan. The monastery itself is small and plain, built for a community that has kept the Carmelite tradition on the mountain from which the order takes its name. The film uses the site's two registers: inside, the silence of a working religious house, its chapel and its garden; outside, the sweep of an agricultural landscape whose fields, roads and villages read like a map from the rooftop. Aerial photography gives full measure to the escarpment and the valley below.
