Dream and Silence

A film about silence and dreams that turn into a curse. Few contemporary directors are as capable as Jaime Rosales of portraying, with such feeling, ordinary people facing unimaginable tragedy. In Solitary Fragments, screened in the New Horizons Competition years ago, he showed what life was like after the trauma of losing a child. In 2012, he returned to the subject of loss in his fourth film, which was up to that point his most classic work and, at the same time, probably his most fulfilling. In Dreamand Silence, the Catalan director lets his serene, black-and-white images speak for themselves, showing the everyday life of a family living in Paris. Yolanda is a teacher, her husband a successful architect, and they have two young daughters. An accident while on vacation destroys their world. The film, largely based on improvised scenes using unprofessional actors, avoids sentimentality and does not fall into the trap of emotional blackmail, which would be only too easy with such a delicate topic. It is a well-balanced portrait of what lies in between-the unreliability of words and gestures, the helplessness of our surroundings, and a world that soon forgets and does not wait for those who cannot keep up with the pace of life.