Directed by Grace Hsia

China & Spain/ 2021/ 10 min/ Fiction, Drama

Synopsis:

An ordinary farming family lives a simple life in a quiet and remote mountain village in the south China. A lonely boy brought his cattle to take shower in the river in an afternoon.

Everything seems calm and peace in this village while hidden crisis is spreading…

IMDb

Director’s Statement:

As a filmmaker, real life experience and social phenomenon always inspire me. Silent Storm is inspired by global pandemic situation that we are facing now. Also inspired by the relationship between animals and human being.

At the end of 2002, SARS first broke out in the Guangdong province, China. The final research results showed that SARS originated from bats. For the next couple of years, the source of many major global epidemics as well as Cov-19 pandemic was pointed at wild animals. Official data showed that an average of 506,000 wild animals were confiscated in China every year from 2015 to 2017. The highest proportion of cases involved illegal acquisition, sales and the production of endangered wildlife. Countries in Asia and Africa have be enidentified as the leading culprits in this culture of exploitive animal trafficking. What lessons can be learnt from it? So I want to explore with SilentStorm, a9-min short film with no dialogue to make a bold and personal guess about causes behind global pandemic nowadays. To create a poetic and innocent picture of nature in simple mountain village, to raise exploratory and ecological questio ns about the relationship between human, nature and animals in the same habitat through a child’s perspective. To serve as a powerful reminder to its audience to consider the delicate balance of ecology coexist. How long will man kind upset the delicate ecological balance between nature and human?