In Silence
Short 15:05 min
Synopsis:
A single young woman named Samina has become isolated and traumatized following a recent car accident which has left her deaf. She wakes late one night from uneasy dreams to find odd things missing around the house and comes to suspect that there is someone in her home with her. She finds herself doubting her own sanity as strange events escalate and finally becomes locked in a mortal struggle with a dangerous force which has lived unseen in her home.
Directors - Brandon Salaz, Salvatore Arnoldo
Brandon Salaz and Salvatore Arnoldo first met as children in North Texas, their love of filmmaking was first sparked when Salvatore brought an old hand-me-down VHS camcorder to Brandon’s house, and they began using it to make skits and short movies in the backyard. The two continued to develop their love of film through their teens—Brandon gravitating towards the visual side and Salvatore the written word, but with plenty of overlap—until they both realized that it was their passion and the industry in which they wanted to build their careers. For over a decade, the two have been working in Phoenix under the banner of Samsara Studios, doing a variety of commercial and creative projects. Their credits include short films such as Separación (2019), Paralyzed (2021), and the documentary Papay Solomon: As We Are (2023).
Director Statement
In Silence unfolds as a highly psychological game of cat-and-mouse as the hearing-impaired protagonist, Samina, simultaneously doubts her own sanity and grapples with the possibility of an unseen intruder in her home. In this, the filmmakers place us squarely inside Samina’s perspective by making In Silence a silent horror film in the classic sense, removing all diegetic sound and replacing it with an evocative original score by Mike Villarreal to express mood. Naturally, as the two filmmakers are not deaf, they approached the story to be more about the anxiety and inescapable sense of isolation that they felt while writing the script during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Even so, it was still very important to the filmmakers to handle the character of Samina with sensitivity and respect, which is why they took steps to reach out to members of the deaf community during the script’s development to craft a character whose experience is authentic. Doing so informed pivotal storytelling points such as using new technologies, like live captioning on FaceTime, to more accurately portray the day-to-day experience of someone affected by hearing impairment.