Silence

Eoghan is a sound recordist who is returning to Ireland for the first time in 15 years, for a job capturing noises in areas free from man-made sound. His quest takes him to remote terrain, away from towns and villages. Throughout his journey, he is drawn into a series of encounters and conversations which gradually divert his attention towards a more intangible silence, bound up with the sounds of the life he had left behind. Influenced by elements of folklore and archive, Silence unfolds with a quiet intensity, where poetic images reveal an absorbing meditation on themes relating to sound and silence, history, memory and exile.

BFI London Film Festival

Dublin Critics Circle 'Michael Dwyer Discovery Award' 2012.

Filmography

2000 Talking to the Dead

2001 Idir na Línte

2002 Oileán Thoraí (Tory Island)

2003 Frank O'Connor - The Lonely Voice

Abbas Kiarostami – The Art of Living [co-directed with Fergus Daly]

2004 Marooned 

John McGahern: A Private World

2005 Domhnach in Éireann (Sunday in Ireland) [co-directed with Conor Hammond, Eamon Little, Adrian McCarth]

Beyond the Mountain

Cathair Corcaigh

Rebel County

2006 David Marcus: A Conversation with Dermot Bolger

2007 Na Duganna

Ar Thóir Logainmeacha

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill - Taibhsí i mBéal na Gaoithe

2008 Loch Dearg [co-directed with Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde]

Gabriel Byrne: Stories from Home

Pilgrim

2009 The Great Irish Famine - Remember Skibbereen

Lough Hyne

2011 What We Leave in Our Wake

Tim Robinson: Connemara

2012 Silence

★★★★

★★★★

'It's an attempt to capture the voices in the ether, the historical connection between people and the land that hosts them...a unique piece of work'

Wendy Ide The Times

★★★★

'...sometimes Eoghan speaks to people, about the past, about bygone depopulation crises, about birds...Mostly we are alone with him and the scenery, and with the rapture of many ears - his and ours - extended to catch to those moments of magic in nature when multitudinous noises stand on the brink of no noise at all."

Nigel Andrews  The Financial Times

★★★★

'Five favourite new films (all of them, quite by accident, to do with love):
Silence... Also quasi-documentary, Collins’s feature debut about an Irish sound engineer seeking locations free from man-made sound is finally a touching love-letter to the notion of home.'
Geoff Andrew inSight and Sound, January 2013

‘Renowned for his documentary work, Pat Collins has delivered a remarkable first fiction feature with Silence, a simple, haunting and poetic vision of Ireland which brings to mind few precedents and defies easy categorisation... an absorbing experience.’
Michael Hayden, London Film Festival Catalogue

‘The symphonic quality to the cinematography, together with the quality of Mac Giolla Bhride’s turn in the central role, results in a spectacle that will resonate with those who appreciate quality cinema. Silence is a deeply personal story, but it’s loaded with a poignant universal resonance – it’s a silence that can be said to speak volumes.’
Sunday Independent

‘Pat Collins, an unclassifiable Irish talent, returns with another starkly beautiful, deliberately confounding quasi-documentary. Close your eyes after a first viewing and you will recall widescreen shots of lapping seas, big skies and sprawling wetlands.’
Donald Clarke, Irish Times
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★★★★

'Silence is a remarkable film: daring, original, even groundbreaking in its way. Though my -- or indeed any -- description of the film will make it sound pretentious and offputtingly arid, in fact it's anything but. Eoghan's task might be ethereal, but Collins grounds his film deep in the western soil.'
Paul Whitington, Irish Independent
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★★★★

'surprising and unquiet meditation on man, memory and landscape.'
Wally Hammond, Time Out London
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★★★★

Michael Pattison Front Row reviews at LFF

'Silence is for Ireland what sleep furiously was for Wales'

Matt Turner Front Row Reviews

Image magazine

'Director Pat Collins is the star here. He manages to get so much right and he uses such simple and beautiful touches to achieve this. His use of archive footage is superb and even the use of maps to give the audience the idea of where Eoghan travels is so simple and so successful that you can’t help but be utterly impressed.'
Thumped.com
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'It's a haunting film, though, not least because it feels like a rare indulgence, allowing yourself the tactile pleasure of stepping outside the blare of the day's rat-run to wallow in the luxury of hush, space and stalled time. It's as if the entire film is one long Pinteresque pause, a deep drawing of some life-giving breath, and for that alone it's a hugely enjoyable experience.'
Declan Burke, Irish Examiner
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'Silence offers its viewers the space to contemplate the images, the soundscapes and these intermittent exchanges.'
Anthony Nield, The Digital Fix Film
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"AMAZING. Silence is not just a film of staggeringly beautiful cinematography and overwhelmingly evocative sound, it is an island of calm in the tumultuous sea of life that allows us to pause and take stock of the world around us."

For film bookings please contact Colin Burch at Verve Pictures — [email protected]. Press resources are on the Press page.