“Sanctuaries of Silence” takes you on a virtual journey into one of Earth’s last remaining bastions of true quiet — the Hoh Rain Forest, in Washington State.
Shooting in beautifully immersive 360 video, directors Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee follow acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton as he explores the mossy, green heart of silence. Vaughan-Lee’s previous Op-Doc, “Vanishing Island,” also took us to a place physically endangered by modernity — Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles.
In “Sanctuaries of Silence,” the threat is not so much to a place, as to our very ability to encounter the natural world on its own terms. As Hempton puts it, “Silence isn’t the absence of something, but the presence of everything.”
