Review of Land of Silence and Darkness

What I was surprised by is how lively she is despite being in the land of silence and darkness. I assumed the film would sulk within a depressing hellscape, which kept me from it for a long time. Rather, she was a brilliant woman and a humanitarian. The poetry of the film is the evolution, adaptation, ingenuity; it posits if you are confined to one sense, imagine the methods of experiencing the world. So, they put their hands on cactuses and animals and derive some great feeling from that. One sense is enough to discern the world's nuance since we are all breaking down the data around us abstractly regardless. She confided to the other man with a smile, "I don't hear or see either." Lastly, consider how odd it is as cinema: we don't experience them not seeing or hearing but we see them as they are, and so much of this film exists in our imagination ('what it would be like') as the world does to them. Therefore this is a kind of cinema of the mind that operates almost invisibly; in this way it reinvents the form while at the same time operating on the surface as this deeply beautiful and resonant portrait.