Set on the wooded slope above Ein Kerem, the Gorny convent belongs to the long Russian Orthodox presence in the Holy Land, one of the strands that gives Jerusalem's religious landscape its exceptional density. Behind its walls lies a self-contained world: churches and chapels, cells among the trees, terraced gardens, workshops and a cemetery, all arranged along paths climbing the hillside. The convent's domes are visible from far across the valley and have become part of the silhouette of Ein Kerem. The film observes the rhythm of the community — the offices, the chanting in Church Slavonic, the care of the gardens, the preparation of feasts that follow the Eastern calendar — and the way a distinctly Russian architectural and devotional culture has taken root in a Mediterranean landscape of pines, cypresses and dry stone. It also situates the convent among the neighbouring Catholic and Orthodox sanctuaries of the valley, showing how several Christian traditions occupy the same small stretch of hillside, each with its own bells, its own hours and its own reading of the same events.
