We don’t see her sad eyes in the first shots. Rather it is her feet, bravely balancing on a narrow ledge in a rustic village building.
The first mournful expression comes from one of the schoolgirls in a classroom seeing Bajar peer through the window. Bajar is locked out of the school, a metaphor for her isolation as a whole. Later we will see cruel children mock her—how unsurprising to note how cruelty needs no passport.
SILENCE brings us to Kurdistan
We are in Kurdistan. The bare bones homes are in a picturesque mountainous terrain. Here, we learn, Bajar will be kept from school until her family can afford the tuition in the private school for deaf children. Her family is loving, but powerless and pained by their inability to help her.
Bajar’s wait for school and normalcy feels interminable. In but the 15 minute length of this film, we feel the weight of this eternity with her. We too are tortured.
How interesting to watch this short film days after Picture This Post published a review of Code of Freaks, a documentary taking on Hollywood’s stereotypes of the disabled. Why can’ t Hollywood instead make films that help the non-disabled to better understand what disability is, Code of Freaks asks? In this writer’s view, Silence does this with a shout.
This film is especially a top pick for anyone interested in other cultures and cinematography capturing exotic terrains.
