Winner of the “Golden Khadar” award for best short film at the Beskop Tshechu Film Festival 2016, “A Song of Silence” is an almost experimental film focusing on a mute and deaf woman and her interactions with nature.
A Song of Silence is streaming on Beskop
The film starts with the protagonist inside her wooden house in the middle of nowhere in the mountains, with a ceiling fan giving a sense of something dangerous is going to happen soon. Nothing happens, however, and the woman moves through the forest and the mountain, coming in touch with earth, wind, fire and water as she tries to feel and understand the world around her through her eyes and touch. Her experiences are juxtaposed with her thoughts, as presented through narration, while the tranquility of the setting occasionally is interrupted by intense weather phenomena, with a kind of thunderstorm in particularly, being impressively depicted.
Her sense of calm and peacefulness permeates the narrative, as we watch her trying to perceive the world through the rest of her senses, although the fact that she cannot stop thinking what she cannot feel is equally obvious. At the same time, though, the harmony she lives within nature, make her appear content and even happy, at least until technology interferes, with Kelzang Dorjee making a metaphoric, but also quite eloquent comment about the way technology harms the environment.
The observations Kelzang Dorjee makes about human nature and the benefits of the co-existing with your environment instead of trying to alter it constantly are the main elements of the narrative, along with the ways deaf and mute people perceive and communicate with the world.
At the same time, however, the main ingredient of the film is beauty, which seems to derive from every aspect. Lexin Choden, the only actor in the short, is strikingly beautiful, with DP Chetan Raghuram's camera taking advantage of the fact with every chance, through a number of shots of different style, while her impressive dresses and the way she moves inside the bucolic environment, give her a nymph-like hypostasis. The same artistry applies to the way the various settings are depicted, with the house, the forest, and the overall area having a card-postale essence that also adds to the beauty of the movie.
Kelzang Dorjee's editing induces the short with a very fitting, leisure pace, although the frequent cuts also give a sense of motion to the narrative, in an approach whose most intent element is a sense of harmony that also derives from Himal Giri, Tashi Gyalpo and Darpan Tamang's music.
“A Song of Silence” is both beautiful and eloquent in its comments, and in general, a very accomplished short
