April 22, 2026
SIFF, Festa Italiana, and Greg Olson Productions Present
MARTIN SCORSESE
MAESTRO OF CINEMA
Silence (2016) Martin Scorsese: At the start of Mean Streets my voice says, “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home.” Father Principe, who taught me in seminary school, said, “You have to have a true calling.” I wondered, how do his priests get past their ego, their pride, and focus on the needs of their parishioners? I wanted to make a film of that question. Sixty years later, I realized I was making that film with Silence. In 2018 I met Pope Francis in Rome, and asked him “Holy Father, today people struggle to change, to believe in the future. They no longer believe in good. We look around, read the newspapers, and it seems the life of the world is marked by evil, even by horror and humiliation. How can a human being today live a good and just life in a society where greed and vanity drive action, where power it expressed through violence? How can I live well when I experience violence?” I think we who make movies don’t do it for ourselves, but to do justice to the life around us and answer the question of what it means to be human. As a child I had a sense of God as a stern force who harshly punished wrongdoing. During the turbulent 1960s I saw Robert Bresson’s film Diary of a Country Priest. At a key moment the priest says, “God is not a torturer. He just wants us to be merciful with ourselves.” That opened something up for me, that was the key. We have to accept ourselves, and live with ourselves. And then maybe it will become easier to live with other people, and to receive their goodness. In the book and the film Silence tenderness and compassion are always there. Always. Even when the characters don’t know that tenderness and compassion are there, we do. I tried for many years to understand how Jesus lives in the world around me, and how his presence could live in me and be expressed by me. With Silence I felt that I had found my way to grappling with the mystery in the right way. From Scorsese’s Script about Jesus: VOICE: You surprise yourself, you really see someone and recognize their humanity... there is Jesus’ sword, severing every tie with all the habits and alibis and unspoken behaviors that keep us at polite distances from each other... and going right to the heart of love. Artists, we keep trying to create something like life as it’s lived, to give form to... what? To this inexplicable mystery, always changing. We hope we’ll end up with something that expresses that mystery. For some of us, trying to describe what happens around those moments of revelation is at the heart of our work. Thanks to The New Yorker poet, film curator and teacher Tova Gannana for her film essay. Greg Olson Productions is sponsored by Inn at the Market.
Directed by: Martin Scorsese Screenplay by: Jay Cocks & Martin Scorsese from Shusaku Endo’s book Cinematography by: Diego Prieto Edited by: Thelma Schoonmaker Production Design by: Dante Ferretti Music by: Kim Allen Kluge & Kathryn Kluge THE PLAYERS: Andrew Garfield as Father Rodrigues Liam Neeson as Father Ferreira Adam Driver as Father Garupe Tadanobu Assano as Interpreter Issey Ogata as Inquisitor Ciaran Hinds as Father Valignamo Shinya Tsukamoto as Mokichi Nana Komatsu as Monica Yosuke Kubozuka as Kichijiro Issei Ogata as Old Samurai