Mori Art Museum

47 Days, Sound-less by Vietnamese artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi is a film that explores the relationships between sound and silence, vision, language, colours and their absence. Nguyễn identifies “peripheries”—including natural landscapes used as backdrops, uncredited characters and soundtracks from American and Vietnamese movies—that reveal more-than-human perspectives. Offering new ways of looking and listening, 47 Days, Sound-less invites audiences to reflect on the inextricable relationship between a place and its inhabitants.

This film is broadly divided into three segments. The first shows clumps of meat drifting under the sea and eventually floating to the surface. The next, set in a black market on an American military base next to a seaside construction site, portrays a woman distributing meat to a throng of male laborers. The final segment takes place in a stalactite-laden cave from which a multitude of women emerge and move towards the sea en masse.