Your film is entered in our Best Indie Awards. What is your film about?
‘Screaming Silence’, is a hauntingly enigmatic and dialogue-free short film. It follows Elizabeth, a young woman in the aftermath of a traumatic event, navigating her world through a haunting soundscape of everyday noises, which ‘peoples’ her world and forces her to face her reality of circumstances and her fear of reaching out for help. As the audience intimately experiences her journey, Elizabeth’s silence becomes a bittersweet force, echoing the profound emotional depth that empowers her to move forward in an altruistic twist of an ending. Its evocative silence allows the audience to experience and encounter the internal world of mental health and isolation.
What are your ambitions with your project?
To be honest, when I started this journey I had no real ambition with the film. I recently finished a Masters degree and text in performance in London, and with that I had to do a dissertation piece. I decided to do a short film, mainly because I know films. I know how to act in them, but I didn't know how to make one so I took on a huge collaborative effort and by huge I mean it was two people and we decided to make a film for my dissertation. I had no plans of doing anything with it. I just wanted to get a top mark and graduate with my Masters and continue my career, but what ended up happening was that I had about15 people in my life watch the film begging me to do something with it and then one of my friends Alba Kaufmann who is my producer on this asked me to send her the film and she asked if she could come on as the main producer. I was a bit shocked, but of course I said yes and still didn't know what I was going to do. When we sat down for meetings we
thought we should just start submitting it to film festivals and that’s when it all took off. The film itself is something that I didn't think I had in me. I always thought maybe I would be cast in something like this and I knew I could do it on the acting side, but I didn't know anything else about it, so when I had all this confidence from people who were close to me, but on thing to note is that I surround myself with people who are incredibly honest, so when we decided to take this and say okay, let's start submitting it to places, we were equally shocked when we started to get selections. Then when we started to be nominated for performance, producing, editing, and for sound design we were so overwhelmed with excitement. Like I said before we are our own self critics and sometimes our own worst enemy, so when the film started to be successful I questioned it. Mainly because I had seen it so many times, that by the 500th time of watching it I thought it wasn’t good enough. I guess you don't realize sometimes you need the inward self reflection or the self gratification from having people like your work because it does mean something. My heart behind the film was making something for myself and inadvertently it’s helping other people. I've had a lot of people come up to me at festivals during the screenings saying that they felt seen or they maybe can't relate to the situation in the film, but they could relate to the emotions of that character. One juror even said that, “this film is for everyone”. That is overwhelming with joy and so much emotion, because a film that is 17 minutes long, that has no dialogue in it can have that much of an effect. I think now that I look back on that, maybe that was my goal; to simply help people and that’s what I’m most proud of.
