The third work of Ehsan Shahhosseini is a 4-minute avant-garde short that was shot with a budget of just $100. “The Silence of God” premiered at Faludi International Film Festival and had a decent festival run, also winning an award for Best Experimental Film from Screen Power Film Festival.
“The Silence of God” review is part of the Submit Your Film Initiative
The movie begins with the sound of cries and of a shovel, while showing a flower blooming in fast forward. The camera presents a titled image, which looks like a funeral procession. The next frame has a two individuals dressed black dresses and white masks in a way that makes them looks as an uncanny Ku Klux Klan group, playing with a baby, who is giggling to their shenanigans. The image is portrayed through the eyes of the baby, and soon we watch a third figure placing a mask on to the baby. The loud voice of a man chanting, the sound of intense breathing and the image of something that looks like blood in the water, concludes the short. All the while the image of a flower that seems to follow the opposite path, from blooming to being a seed in the ground, is interspersed throughout the movie.
It is not exactly easy to understand what is happening here, since the camera angles and the intense zoom-ins by DP Arad Hessari, and the storytelling as indicated by the uncanny editing of Shahhosseini create a sense of disorientation. There is a sense, however, that the figures of the grown ups are members of a religious group, and that in the end, the baby dies, bringing us back to the beginning of the movie, which depicts what looks like a funeral. The opposite growth of the flower that appears throughout the movie seems to condone this approach, but definitely not with surety.
Despite the confusion, which actually seems to be purposeful, the ritualistic nature of the movie, as much as the combination of image and sound, are quite powerful, with the mystery about what is happening actually working in favor of the movie, which ends up being quite entertaining. The fact that this could be a horror story also adds to its overall quality, essentially deeming it a “proper” film and not one that would be better suited for a type of installation.
In the end, “The Silence of God” leaves us with more questions than answers, but it is precisely this ambiguity that makes the movie so captivating, along with the overall audiovisual approach.
