“Voice is breath vocalised” in Reka Valerik’s Silent Voice

“Can you try to make a sound?” – After a few suspended seconds, the question swallows itself, heavy in the air, unsupported, unanswered. Meanwhile, a young man hunches with his back towards the camera. None of his face, features, not even a silhouette visible to the audience. What is discernible is a friendly hand placed on his shoulder, consolation and unspoken understanding encapsulated in the tightness of the frame. The opening sequence of Silent Voice seems nuclear for the film’s 52 minutes of runtime, in the way that it both conceals and reveals not only its protagonist, the 26-year-old MMA fighter-turned-refugee, Khavaj, but also the support system that gravitates around him, as displaces as he is from his native Chechnya fleeing from one Belgian city to another. 

Chechnya, the North Caucasian republic, made the news in 2017, when journalists from ‘Novaya Gazeta’, a newspaper that’s highly critical of Russia, reported evidence of consistent abuse persecution of homosexual men and women. These events have now given the name of Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime as one of ‘anti-gay’ purges. Last year, American reporter David France took his camera to the Chechen Republic and made Welcome to Chechnya (2020), an HBO-produced feature documentary to capture the activism behind saving torture victims in the aforementioned purges. Made by Reka Valerik (whose identity is also disguised for security reasons), Silent Voice is a much more intimate documentary, since it focuses on one personal account but interweaves the multitude of narratives already embedded in any single story. 

The film owes its piercing quality to the interlacing of form and content. Arnaud Alberola’s claustrophobic use of framing and the trembles of his handheld camerawork works best to capture the disquieting aftermath of Khavaj’s flight from hometown Grozny: the loss of speech. Voiceless (medically diagnosed as having Psychogenic Aphonia at the film’s beginning), Khavaj loses (or maybe declines, once deeply traumatised) the ability to tell his story. The documentary then traces the chronicle of his journey, as told and perceived by others. On the one hand, the audience meets the Belgian NGO workers who speak on his behalf during the psychological evaluation. On the other hand, a constant presence of voice recordings makes up most of the film’s soundscape: Khavaj’s mother leaves messages for him on Whatsapp. The consecutive manner in which they are played (both for Khavaj to hear, and amplified as for the audience to participate in) ebbs and flows, a testament to the mother’s grief and the son’s incurable sense of not belonging. The more his mother talks, cries, begs, and curses, the more one’s convinced that Khavaj’s suffering is beyond words.

For the very amount of articulate voice lost, a retributive amount of tactility shines through. The square ratio and grainy texture come to life, whenever Khavaj’s body is captured in a miniature or close up. One gesture, in particular, composes itself time and time again: arched spine, head bent, hands shoving it downwards – an epitome of despair, of sought annihilation. His body language is brusque, and at times unbridled, as auto-aggression reassembles his limbs and presses against surfaces. Some shots are more tender than others: extreme close-ups of him massaging his vocal cord and throat, which reveal exactly how physical, how audible the act of breathing really is. Voice is breath vocalised, after all. 

Silent Voice uses the tools of haptic cinema to render the inaudible caressable, with its undivided attention focused on Khavaj’s skin as granular, its veins and folds, tiny scars and muscular indentations captured by a palpitating camera. The body of an MMA fighter who can no longer practice professionally – since all the Belgian clubs are actually owned by Chechens who would turn him in – is portrayed as both vulnerable and invulnerable, its physical presence exacerbated in solitary exercises performed in an empty hotel room, and even more tangible in a gym tackle which erupts between one of the workers helping him.

In order to preserve the ethics of Khavaj’s representation, the observational camera persists on not showing him in direct address. There are numerous ways of hiding someone’s face in order to conceal their identity, such as a targeted blur within the frame, but Valerik prefers to draw the audience as close as possible to a protagonist on the run and to simultaneously sustain an ethically charged space. Therefore, his choice of employing artistic obstruction in the blocking and framing of each shot, as to avoid face frontal, reads more like a sought acknowledgement of intimacy at a distance, than an emphasis on the role of staging in the film’s production. Such a gap is also visible in the way it’s shot – or how the crew’s observational presence keeps its distance but is entirely invested in its subject. While the camera hovers on his shoulders (behind him but not over his shoulder, implying we cannot share his path, nor show it, we can only follow him), his back is what remains discernible throughout.

Silent Voice is a searing testimony to Khavaj’s personal journey from Chechnya where homosexuality is persecuted to Belgium where he’s forced to take up a new identity. Amidst Khavaj’s post-traumatic stress-induced voicelessness, and the attempts at talking that takes the form of humms, yelps, and even shrieks, Silent Voice condemns a perilous notion of subjectivity: that of masculinity as vocal, rational, articulate, which has nested in European thought as an oppressive heteronormative standard.