Story Based on Poetic Impulses

This is S. Thala, up to the river. After the river, it´s still S. Thala.

Marguerite Duras, The Love.

A large house, near the sea. Three loves: a love that screams, a love of bodies that love each other, a wise and calm love. A story in three moments or perhaps the story in one alone, the story of a single love. A story about silence and its echoes, about the word that resists appearing, about death.

A woman who loves silence and repeatedly observes the beating of the waves, their sway, their repetition. A story with persistent musical gravity, built with a few images that multiply repeatedly and a narrating voice that reiterates and transforms into an echo that unravels the words that become the memory of the silent woman.

The story of a woman, of three men, of three loves, three stories or perhaps just one.

Directing Memory

After finishing reading ´The Silence´, the novel by Mª Ángeles Cabré, when it was published in 2008, I immediately felt the need to write a film script based on a few images that would multiply while a narrating voice reiterated in a kind of echo from the powerful text of the writer. I didn´t do it because I didn´t feel capable of finding financing for something that claimed essayistic forms not usual in the action of cinema. Six years later, by chance, I came across a mansion that immediately reminded me of the main setting of the novel ´The Silence´. I was shooting a short film in it. I immediately proposed to the artistic and technical team if they would be willing, under the same conditions we were working on, to shoot a feature film. Everyone agreed.

´The Silence´ transformed into ´The Lover of Silence´, and a text that paid homage to the writing of Marguerite Duras also transforms into a film that not only pays homage to the films of the writer but also to a certain cinema of the sixties, a modern, radical cinema, a cinema of experience and creation, a cinema that establishes bridges between literary utopia and the utopia that must pass through art. In short, a free cinema. My personal experience throughout the creation process of ?The Lover of Silence? leads me to vindicate a term currently little appreciated: the amateur filmmaker or rather the filmmaker who loves his work, which is what the word amateur actually means.

An Inner Adventure by Mª Ángeles Cabré

The lover of silence is a story written based on poetic impulses in which the protagonist is not so much the woman, a specific woman, as the feminine condition. We know her fleeing from noise, but noise understood as everything that pushes her to not be able to be herself and prevents her from articulating her true identity. At first, that unease we call noise makes us think of gender violence, especially if we understand it as the quintessence of that secular condemnation that patriarchy has inflicted on women as a whole by denying them their own voice.

Fleeing from noise and walking towards silence, the woman becomes the lover of silence, ´already without any fear of being contaminated by noise´, ´immune to it´. Directing her steps towards silence, she seeks herself, her inner balance. A painful journey, as all journeys are, full of advances and setbacks, gains and losses. Until one day the lover of silence discovers that she is determined to start over, just as many women have to reinvent themselves every day to be who they really are and not who others have wanted them to be.