Silenced

A Sad And Powerful Drama
Silenced (aka The Crucible) is a drama based on real events. In-Ho is a new teacher at a school for the hearing impaired. He immediately notices his students are acting strange. He then finds out that they have been physically and sexually abused by their teachers and even the principal. The students' vivid stories are told and brought to court. This is an amazing film.

First, I have to mention, this movie has a lot of violence towards children- both physically and sexually. It gets very hard to watch as you hear the agonizing screams of the children. The kids tell their stories in sign-language and its interpreted by their teacher, In-Ho. You hear and see the stories of three students (one tells a sad story that involves his brother). I think the story involving Mr. Park was the most disturbing because of how detailed and evil it was; I don't want to spoil the movie, but he was a really sick man for doing what he did to those boys in the bathroom. The rest are still...

The hidden expose of an age old occurrence...
This is a very well made expose of an age old occurrence. Abuse of Deaf children, in so called places of safety and learning, by so called "saviors" is an age-old phenomenon. These so-called saviors are really pedophiles who think that they have found the perfect victims in Deaf children who by all descriptions are as close to society's definition of "normal" children, apart from their ability to communicate clearly and specifically. While these children may be master communicators in their own sign language, their inability to communicate in spoken language often proves to be their greatest crucible.

The few people such as the altruistic protagonist, Kang In-ho, who are fully able to converse in BOTH the spoken language--of the country the Deaf child might hail from--and the Deaf child's spoken language, often expose the "unspeakable evil" perpetrated by these "noble saviors." Hopefully this film will lead to more true stories of this sad but common phenomenon at Deaf...

Speaking out
Based on a real-life case of child abuse at a home for deaf children in a South Korean small town, Silenced obviously deals with sensitive and harrowing material, but its stance is a curious one. On the one hand, it necessarily has to make the subject accessible for a wide audience which weakens the realism to some extent, but on the other hand, it director/writer Hwang Don-hyuk's position on the legal ruling is less ambivalent than that of the Korean courts, siding wholeheartedly behind the innocent children who were abused at the school and, quite frankly, depicting the trial of the accused as being a complete cover-up where their lenient sentences were bought by a corrupt legal system.

It doesn't take too long for new Art teacher In-ho to realise that not everything is above board in Ja-ae Academy for the deaf in the small country town of Mujin. A young boy has recently died on the railway tracks and there's an air of corruption at the school, with the new teacher...

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