Abuse is bad and should be reported, full stop. But it’s not so easy to do so, when abusers stay in positions of power, and the people who are assigned to keep them in check are cowardly against them. Silenced depicts true crime novel The Crucible, which in turn, is based on a real life case of the Gwangju Inhwa School. Through the perspective of a new art teacher, Silenced systematically outlines how difficult it is to deliver justice, from the way the school administration bribed police and the education department, to the way the court didn’t even think to hire a deaf interpreter. It’s a horrific watch, but the intensity of the depiction was needed, given that this film’s release pushed South Korea’s government to change their laws and the actual school shut down within the same year.
Based on actual events that took place at Gwangju Inhwa School for the hearing-impaired, where young deaf students were the victims of repeated sexual assaults by faculty members over a period of five years in the early 2000s.
After being hired as an art teacher for a school for deaf children, Kang In-ho uncovers the sexual and physical abuse doled out by the school’s administration, and fights to expose these crimes with human rights activist Seo Yoo-jin.
The way the film handles the abuse scenes. It’s handled in a way that the actual violent actions aren’t committed (as it should be), but the intensity of the scenes are still intact. No wonder the entire country was in outrage.
Cases like this are why films should be made.
Nice
Very nice and sad