Hello Hivers,
Silenced is a Korean movie of 2011 based on the true story of a school for the hearing-impaired, where young deaf students were the victims of repeated sexual assaults by faculty members.
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Plot
Kang In-ho is a new art teacher at the Benevolence Academy, a school for the hearing-impaired. He tries immediately to build a good relationship with his new students, but something is off. All of his students behave in a strange way and most of them seem scared. At night he hears screams coming from the bathrooms and he also sees the other teachers beating the children. In the end, he discovers the sad truth, some of the students are victims of sexual abuse from some of the teachers and even the principal itself. He and a woman he meets casually at the beginning and works as a human activist, try to fight the situation. They try to report the situation to the police but find out that the police are also on the headmaster's payroll and are covering it up.
So they decide to turn to the media and report the situation with a video. From this, an investigation is opened and a trial follows.
This is how far I will go with the plot since I don't want to spoiler the movie too much.
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Why you should watch it
Mainly because:
It is based on a true story, and everyone should know what happened in that school. These are the kinds of stories that seem too much even for a movie and when you think that something like this happened for real, well, you kind of lose faith in mankind... after watching the movie I was unable to fall asleep, I couldn't stop thinking that what I just watched happened for real and those poor kids had to suffer those unspeakable things and couldn't do anything.
Sexual abuse is one of the worst crimes that exists, and doing it on defenseless children is ... well I don't know how to describe it, I am still now speechless.Like all Korean films, the film does not give any kind of ultimate satisfaction. It depicts stark reality and does not seek better alternatives to what is indeed a very heavy story. You have to expect a really raw film, with some very disturbing scenes, which they probably could have cut, but instead, they decided to keep, and I must say that in my opinion, it was an extreme but brave choice... The ultimate aim of the film is to raise awareness as well as to inform, and including such crude and "disturbing" scenes serves to enter even more into the mind of the viewer and to shock him so much that he will not easily forget what he has just seen.
The actors are good, I cannot say if they are famous or not, since I have never seen them in other movies (apart from Kim Joo-ryeong, who become famous recently for Squid Game), but still I enjoyed their acting and even the kids were really great in their roles. I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been for them to interpret these roles, knowing what the victims of the abuses had to suffer.
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Rating
I don't want to give a vote this time, since here I don't think that the acting or the movie itself are the important things, what really matters is that everyone knows what happened and that we do everything that we can to not let it happen again.
