PRIX EUROPA
Best European Radio Drama of the Year 2011
TACET (SILENCE 2)
Entering organisation: Westdeutscher Rundfunk - WDR / ARD
Country: Germany
Paul Plamper (Author/Director),
Rashad Becker (Sound),
Martina Müller-Wallraf (Commissioning editor),
DLF (Co-Producer)
JURY CITATION
"The awarded programme poses a very important question: How does communication constitute human beings? The programme we honour uses a trick: It puts silence at its heart. One day a woman stops talking. Nobody knows why, there are no visible reasons. And very soon the people around her feel threatened, they become aggressive, they can talk endlessly but they can’t live with the silence anymore.
The German radiomaker Paul Plamper created a very intelligent arrangement to demonstrate that, as human beings, we can only exist if we share communication."
SYNOPSIS
A woman suddenly stops speaking – the symptom of a mysterious disease or a conscious act? A panorama of voices forms around this vocal void. From the reactions of friends and acquaintances, we learn about the preceding events and begin to sense the reasons for her silence. The speakers put words into her mouth, tapping a succession of methods to get her talking again. But she settles down in silence. Is this "expression" of civil disobedience a sign of some superior form of wisdom? The longer she maintains her silence, the more insistently she seems to question the purpose of language and the community.