SILENCE OF REASON

North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina | 2023 | 63 min | col.

Silence of Reason is a radical and feminist act that transforms research and history into a political act. The film reproduces how our memory works when a traumatic experience occurs, insisting on the short-circuit between form and content that is created when meaning is irreversibly distorted by horror. Collecting first-person experiences, the film is composed of transcriptions from the UN trial that in 2000 condemned the mass sexual violence against Muslim women perpetrated in the Foča ‘sexual enslavement centres’ during the Bosnian war. Text overlaps with video footage and archive photographs, forensic evidence, and prosecution exhibits. On these images are engraved the words of the women who were sexually assaulted. Their voices are vivid, frank, uncensored, while the images from the original VHSs are altered for the alterations to stand out against the original footage – voices that stand as a total, indelible indictment as well as an act of emancipation. (l.f.)

Film also available on the MYmovies ONE platform for 72h.