SILENT LAND MAKES NOISE @TIFF2021

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There is no doubt that audiences will feel that director Aga Woszczyńska‘s Silent Land (Cicha Ziemia) is so. After making her short Fragments, she wanted to make a feature film that would show the development of her characters. One where it would speak to a global audience about the navigation of your own moral compass. The director did not realize that her film would resonate with such an audience. Thus Silent Land would be selected at a TIFF.

We felt that she was still on the moon about her film making the mark that it is. We could feel her emotions, speaking directly with Aga Woszczyńska here in Toronto. You can tell that she is on the moon making this trip to TIFF to rep her own film. After asking her the biggest challenge in making Silent Land, the humble director answers “COVID” to put in words. She comments on the waiting game she had to play when the pandemic hit. Waiting to travel, shoot and produce the film in Italy, Poland and Czech Republic. Most directors at TIFF had the same problem, but not as enlightened as her when her film was selected. Silent Land is a film with a universal message about our cognitive bias.

The story focuses on a Polish bourgeois couple who decides to take a vacation in Italy. Adam (Dobromir Dymecki) and Anna (Agnieszka Żulewska) want to get away from it all. This is why they chose an elegant secluded vaction house by the water. They do have a swimming pool but it isn’t working. They ask the landlord if he would be able to get it started. So he summons a young Arab man to fix the pool which to the couple will be taking forever. Until he slips and falls by the ledge of the empty pool to the deep end of its surface.

Things start to go a lot sour when they both have to report to the police of what had happened. In addition, the landlord has spoken to the village about the death which has them paranoid. After another visit to the police station, the couple really start to dig into their own souls thinking that they were able to save the pool boy from actually dying.

Adam and Agnes try to keep their mind off the incident by taking diving lessons from a couple who run a small diving tour. Jean-Marc Barr who plays Arnaud (The Big Blue) along with his wife Claire (Alma Jodorowksy) are also having to face an incident that they had in the past. They speak of a client who almost died through suffocating while diving. Not as traumatic as the pool boy’s death but difficult to handle. He tries to justify their actions as something that they were not able to do. As Agnes says, she was in shock and Adam was there to comfort her at that pivotal moment.

The film reminds you of Anthony Minghella‘s Talented Mr. Ripley where the beautiful backdrop of Italy contrasts to the darkness and trauma the couple is experiencing. It also shows the perils of lack of communication between people, genders and more commonly race. It is what Woszczyńska stresses in her film that not being able to communicate but wanting to communicate.

This notion is basically what it comes down to when it comes to the immigration crisis in Europe and Afghanistan. Studying this behaviour in a tighter lens yet in a broad landscape really gives the characters in Silent Land some breathing room to develop their own understanding of their moral obligations.

There’s not a pulsing soundtrack that is behind the premise of Silent Land and there is no need for it. Rather Woszczyńska wants to focus on the behaviour and most importantly the difficult dialogue of communication between estranged races. How it either makes us all closer or distant is all up to us. We all have cognitive bias or preconceived notions about one another. To be blunt, what Woszczyńska emphasizes in her film Silent Land why we want to build a wall or not with one another.