Silent City is a walk through my hometown of Oxford after dark, when the uncanny world of the night comes out to play.
The journey began as a documentary of urban strangeness, but as the global pandemic took hold in 2020 it turned into something completely different. The silent city is no longer a famous place called Oxford, a fabled city of dreaming spires, but a Tarkovskian zone of my own imagining, bereft of people: waiting, always waiting. We each make our own city, and we make it anew each time we visit.
“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” ― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
