Exquisitely shot in black-and-white, Old Believers depicts a world of mist-enveloped swamps, wizened peasants, pious youngsters, and old churches where the bells are still rung, in haunting performances, by hand. This isolated spiritual community in the Danube Delta, now part of Romania, descends from a group forced out of seventeenth-century Russia as a result of a schism in the Orthodox Church. Responding to the filmmaker's questions about guardian angels, the devil, death, and whether man could have walked on the moon, the inhabitants graciously convey the faith that in large part still grounds their lives.