Lake Seliger, between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, is a labyrinth of islands and inlets; on one of them, Stolobny, a hermit named Nil settled in solitude, and around his memory a monastery took shape. What began as a retreat became, in later centuries, a monumental ensemble: a domed cathedral in a sober neoclassical manner, ranges of buildings following the shoreline, granite quays, a causeway linking the island to the mainland. Seen from the water the monastery reads as a small city afloat, its towers doubled in the lake. Closed and repurposed during the Soviet period, it has since returned to monastic use and to pilgrimage. Filmed in 4K by air and from the lake, the programme moves through the seasons of Seliger and inside the walls of a community shaped by isolation.
