Silence DVD

Silence has been rated 15 by the BBFC. This is for scenes of strong violence and torture.

For Christians, 17th Century Japan was a dangerous place to be.

Silence centres on a Priest, Father Sebastian Rodrigues, who embarks on a mission to Japan. After the recent defeat of the Shimabara Rebellion in which a number of Catholic peasants rebelled against the Shogunate, Japan's Christians come under a period of heavy persecution.

For Father Sebastian Rodrigues this means resisting what his mentor could not: the renouncing of his faith, committing apostasy by stepping on a fumie (a bronze image of Jesus that was used as a test of faith, where suspected Christians were made to trample on the plaque or face execution or imprisonment).

Trying to come to terms with why his mentor would commit such an act of heresy, Rodrigues struggles with what will happens when he himself will be commanded to trample on the fumie.

Should he die for his faith, or trample and publicly renounce Christianity to save his own life?

Set during the rule of the Tokogawa Shogunate, and just before the whole country closed itself off from the rest of the world, Silence is a historical film heralded as of director Martin Scorsese's theological culmination and an example of what happens when the very finest of film-making is turned towards a meaningful story.