About

'Land of Silence and Darkness' is particularly close to my heart; if it didn't exist there would be a hole in my life. Fini Straubinger – the fifty-six-year-old deaf and blind woman at the centre of the film – helped me understand something about loneliness to an extent I never had before … The film is about the terror of sometimes not being able to make ourselves understood, and our subsequent isolation.

Land of Silence and Darkness will screen from an archival 16mm film print.

Land of Silence and Darkness is an early Herzog documentary that remains perhaps the most deeply affecting work the director has crafted. The film centres on the work of Fini Straubringer, a woman who became deaf and blind in her childhood, and her tireless quest to provide company and education to people who were born without sight or hearing. Herzog follows Straubringer as she visits various people and communicates with them through the touching of their hands. Land of Silence and Darkness is a moving and empathetic portrait of the loneliness that emerges when one loses the means of communication with those around them.