The Monks were five American GIs in cold-war Germany who billed themselves as the anti-Beatles. Heavy on feed-back, nihilism and electric banjo, they modeled themselves after Franciscan monks, dressed in black, mocked the military and rocked harder than any of their mid-sixties counterparts while managing to basically invent industrial, heavy metal, punk and techno music.
This genre-overlapping documentary not only situates the phenomenon of 1960s German pop-music in its political, social and cultural-historical contexts, but also reveals the Monks’ project as the first marriage of art and popular music, beating Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground to the punch. The five protagonists of the film came to Germany in 1961 as soldiers and left the country in 1967 as avant-garde monks. For more than thirty years they were not able to talk about their strange experience – here the five original band members recount their adventure for the very first time.

“It takes more than just documenting a great band to make a great movie: the band has to be unique in spirit and story and fit into a larger picture of the rock canon, and the filmmakers have to find the cinematic language to bring that essence to the screen. Never have these rarities all come together more beautifully than in MONKS.” –Allison Anders

“Post and Palacios interview a series of art and music luminaries to parse what your ears tell you right away – that the Monks sounded like nothing else, that their unity behind beats (off-kilter but severe) and riffs (like the Hulk playing James Brown) anticipated a spectrum of crazed modern music, from heavy metal to dancehall.” –Peter S. Scholtes, STAR TRIBUNE