Feature film released Friday 27 November 2020 on
Blink in the Endless as digital
description
"When I was fifty six I went mute for ten days."
- Katherine Amesbury
Film festival screenings to date (online because of COVID-19):
"The Silence After Life" is Daniel Thomas Freeman's debut as a feature film writer / director and it builds on his previous solo
music work and his ten years as part of the South London ambient / drone / folk trio Rameses III. This new project has
involved over a hundred people and has taken five years to complete, including over two years to edit the film and to
create the extensive and immersive sound design and score.
The 70 minute film is an experimental drama / meditation on grief, spirituality and the beauty of nature. It uses minimal dialogue
and takes cinematic inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, Shane Carruth, Peter Strickland, Sally Potter and
Derek Jarman. It stars Sally Mortemore ("Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets", "Game of Thrones") who plays a lonely
woman in her fifties who, after a serious accident, experiences intense visions as she loses her voice and runs away from
home to live rough in the beauty of the English woods. Sally is supported by actors Emma Spearing ("Red Call"), Lucy Alfred
and David Broughton-Davies.
Making "The Silence After Life" started after Daniel's intense but wonderful experience of working with screenwriters / directors
Daniel and Matthew Wolfe to co-write the music score for their feature "Catch Me Daddy" (2014, STUDIOCANAL / Film4 / BFI).
Seeing edit after edit of that film over a period of nine months unexpectedly awakened a 35 year old dream of filmmaking.
Although a newcomer to making features, Daniel had extensive experience of writing, producing, editing and releasing slow-change
music so a cinematic equivalent of this music seemed possible, if ambitious. "A Book of Silence" by Sara Maitland was a key
inspiration for this film; her literary documentation of how the edges of our material world can blur and shimmer when we are
faced with silence reflected his own personal experiences. The slowness, emptiness and loneliness of grief is depicted less
often onscreen, particularly in terms of a spiritual reaction, so this felt like a subject worth tackling.
The choice to make main character Katherine mute for most of the film was therefore not just a way of making space for the score
but was actually a key part of pushing the film beyond narrative and into gut-level experience. Although she is largely silent,
Katherine was always written as a complex character; seemingly strong and aloof but also a vulnerable, awkward and lonely outsider.
Another reason for the minimal dialogue and extensive use of visions and nature is to very purposefully leave the narrative open to
interpretation. Grief and spirituality are such personal experiences that Daniel wanted to give audiences the space for their own
thoughts, feelings, beliefs and reactions. As such the film has been designed to be more visceral, raw, slow and beautiful than
intellectual, rational, prescriptive or immediate.
Although the film centres on grief and spirituality, it also touches on the traditional and understandable divide between the LGBTQ+
and faith communities and gently imagines what a reconciliation of that divide might (and in some cases already does) look like.
"Haunting ... wonderful performances"
- Brenda Blethyn, Oscar nominee
"Packed with gravitas and pathos, power and beauty"
- Brighton Rocks International Film Festival
"An intensely poetic meditation on life, grief and spirituality"
- Ramsgate International Film & TV Festival
BUY / RENT FEATURE FILM
soundtrack album also available
IMDB page
chapters
01 - After the Accident
02 - The Woods Girl
03 - Amongst the Trees
04 - All Saints
05 - Claire
06 - Remembrance
07 - Revelation
credits
Written, directed and scored by Daniel Thomas Freeman
Sally Mortemore (as Katherine Amesbury)
Emma Spearing (as Claire Renshaw)
Lucy Alfred (as Marianne Blake)
David Broughton-Davies (as Martin Smith)
Co-producer / creative consultant - Valerie Adam Freeman
Sound assistant - Anna Durbridge
Catalogue Number BE011DTF