Father Sebastian Rodriguez and Father Francisco Garupe are two young Portuguese missionaries.

They travel to Japan to exercise their ministry among villagers persecuted for their Christian religious beliefs and to search for their missing in-teacher and mentor, Father Christovao Ferreira, the Jesuit who many believe abjured in favor of Buddhism. The two young men's disbelief over the news will lead them to journey into a Japan in which feudal lords and Samurai were determined to eradicate Christianity from the country by subjecting all those who were considered Christians to torture, apostasy, and abjuration until they were induced to a slow and painful death.

The two young Jesuit students will experience an extremely cruel reality both in terms of their survival and the harsh test to which they must subject their beliefs, while the Silence of God becomes deafening.

It all happens at the beginning of the Edo period: while the first missionaries had arrived about a hundred years earlier during the Sendoku period, when Christians were still well received, during the Togukawa period the shogunate began to consolidate its power and unify Japan, so European missionaries will begin to be perceived as a threat, and an expulsion edict of 1614 will force them into hiding.

The novel by Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Christian author, from which this film is based, has been the subject of analysis and debate since it was first released in 1966, as it describes extremely effectively "the conflict between a profession of faith, its expression, and the apparent silence of God while believers are drawn into violence in his name."

Martin Scorsese was seduced by this script and put to work a team of researchers and technicians who could realize the design of such an ambitious work. Amid torture, crucifixions, bad weather and impervious geographical conditions, he managed to tell a story of faith and religion, to portray a filmic essay examining the spiritual problem of God's silence in the face of human suffering.

The time and space of the film are conditioned by the need to show and explain the idea: a cinema, his, capable of reproducing the complexity of thought while respecting full freedom of expression, using the camera as a pen, a kind of film literature capable of expressing thought in a versatile and effective way.

A filmic essay at the same time historical, political, and religious in which the vision of the filmmaker shines through without hesitation, especially when Father Sebastian persists in talking about Christian truth by raising it to the level of an absolute truth.

The thread of thought does not proceed in a single direction: the dialectic between fiction and nonfiction makes it a cinema of pure reflection in which the subject matter becomes the basis of an intellectual construction capable of generating the overall form and even the structure of the film without distorting and distorting it.

A social testimony, a political-religious use of the medium that makes one grasp Scorsese's challenging desire to reach an embodied audience, to communicate directly with the viewer to involve him or her in the creation of filmic meaning and in this way to overcome the inevitable narrowness of a device.

The viewer feels challenged because the filmmaker comes out of the closet, admits his partiality and voluntarily undermines his authority by taking a contingent and personal point of view.

An authentic and new political awareness, an act of trust for the expressive medium and for the interlocutor/viewer.

The philosophical theme of doubt and Kierkegaardian paradox is tightly woven into the words of Scorsese, who finds it extremely painful and paradoxical to believe and doubt, concepts that seem antithetical but go hand in hand, nourishing each other from certainty to doubt, solitude, and communion.

The mystery of God lies in the silence and paradox of his dictates, often in conflict with ethics as Kierdegaard reminds us through the figure of Abraham.

can "belief in one God" allow the choice of abjuration if at stake is the survival of men condemned to torture and death?

God's silence is perhaps the space left for men to make the choice: to believe despite everything or not to believe.

As the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard reminds us, faith is absurdity, paradox and scandal and takes man beyond reason, beyond all possible understanding.

But faith believes in spite of everything therefore: Silence!

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice