Art Smitten: Reviews - 2017

Faith is a difficult concept to explain to non-believers. I was never raised religiously, or even with any sort of a belief in a god. As such, I generally struggle to connect to stories of faith and to characters who so strongly experience faith, and it takes something special to make me truly understand what these people are going through. But Martin Scorsese, with his latest film Silence, has managed to do just that. Himself a lapsed Catholic, he may just be in the best position to convey the intricacies of faith. Silence is the story of two Portuguese Christian missionaries in Japan in the 17th century, a time when Christianity was forbidden and severely persecuted. It’s based on a novel of the same name by Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Christian author, which in turn is based on a real set of historical events. The two missionaries, Rodrigues and Garupe (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver), travel to Japan in pursuit of another priest by the name of Ferreira (Liam Neeson) who had gone to Japan many years ea