DEAFENING SILENCE

Projet Betula announces an Open Call for Deafening Silence, the second chapter in a screening cycle that began with Speak Volumes in September 2025. While the first chapter considered the persistence of voices within haunted landscapes, family archives, and spectral bodies, the current chapter shifts attention to what remains unsaid or unspoken.

We invite artists and filmmakers working with experimental film, video, and moving-image forms, whose work engages with silence as a condition shaped by power, catastrophe, refusal, or survival.

We are interested in three interconnected forms of deafening silence:

1. Enforced Silence
Silence imposed through force: colonial or state violence, displacement, imprisonment, border controls, economic deprivation, or bureaucratic erasure. It happens when people are denied the chance to speak, talk about what they have lived through, and be recognised.

2. After the Explosion
The silence that follows a catastrophe: war, forced migration, environmental destruction, the collapse of infrastructure, or the breakdown of a familiar social world. It can be felt as shock, exhaustion, disorientation, or the sense that language is no longer enough to describe what happened.

3. Silence as Survival
This form of silence is connected to the right not to be fully understood, explained, or exposed to others. Silence can protect personal boundaries and keep parts of one’s experience private. It can also be a deliberate choice not to speak — a form of protection and a strategy for survival.