Two outsiders fall in love in a half-abandoned town that sits somewhere between dream and reality in Silence 6-9, the directorial debut from actor and screenwriter Christos Passalis.
Passalis stars as Aris, a man who arrives on foot at a mysterious coastal town for a new job working on the bizarre system of antennas that seem to command a strange reverence from the townspeople. At first, he feels like a fish out of water; the hotel he’s staying at is abandoned, he can’t get into his workplace, and he gets in trouble one morning simply for speaking. When he meets Anna (Angeliki Papoulia), a fellow outsider, she helps him adjust to the peculiar nature (and inhabitants) of the scarcely populated town.
Aris learns that the townspeople keep vanishing into thin air, and the antenna systems capture transmissions from those that have disappeared. The town enforces a daily silence from 6-9am in order to record those transmissions and figure out where their loved ones have disappeared to and how to help bring them home.
There’s a gently surreal quality to the ghost-like town as it seems to exist in a permanent state of pause, the daily silence and recordings the only routine or semblance of structure. Aside from Anna and Aris we rarely see anyone out and about or participating in familiar daily life. When we do come across the townsfolk, they are usually taking part in a ritual or event related to the vanished ones and are never in any hurry. It’s a little reminiscent of Sleeping Beauty with the community stuck in time day after day, waiting to wake up from a dreamlike existence.
The film uses its creative premise to explore the difficulty of saying goodbye and to examine different approaches and reactions to life and death. The inhabitants of the town are divided. Some are entirely devoted to listening for their departed loved ones and preserving their voices after they are gone. This group observes the daily rituals of silence and recordings like it’s their religious duty. Others go so far as to hire people to act the part of their vanished loved ones, as in Anna’s case. She dresses up as a man’s vanished wife, memorizes the wife’s cassette recordings and mimics her mannerisms. It all culminates at an odd peep show involving a choreographed interpretive movement and men talking to their (hired) vanished partners through small holes in a wall, a symbolic separation.
Opposing the idea of shaping their lives around the vanished ones is a small group of people who form protests, demanding no more cassette tapes and no more silence. This group of dissenters insists it’s been too many years, no vanished one has ever returned, and that it’s time to stop the recordings. They are frustrated and disenchanted, believing the vanished folk never even try to come back despite the town’s efforts to help. Interestingly, this group also argues that the vanished have forgotten them, the townspeople.
Anna and Aris fall in love amid the dangers of disappearing. Both a bit peculiar themselves, they fit into the town more than they realize, adapting to its static and dreamlike state. Staying at the same abandoned hotel, they spend their days together swimming in the sea, observing the town, and eventually participating in the strange rituals. Neither is immune to the town’s effects, and they become intimately involved in its mysterious problem.
While we learn a little more about the vanished ones in a surreal sequence, the film leaves the story and its ending open to interpretation. It aligns with the film’s broad exploration of what happens when people disappear from our lives, where they go and how we respond.
Silence 6-9 was written by Passalis and Eleni Vergeti. The film premiered at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival as part of the Crystal Globe competition.
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