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WHITE NOISE

Horror - Development 2024

When a headstrong art conservation student grappling with an agonizing hypersensitivity to sound discovers the world’s quietest chamber at a remote art museum, she stops at nothing to experience the ultimate relief of total silence.

Festivals
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Whistler Film Festival Power Pirch Competition 2021

- Year of production
- 2024
- Genres
- Horror, Female director, Thriller
- Countries
- CANADA
- Languages
- ENGLISH
- Budget
- 3 - 5 M$
- Duration
- 93 mn
- Writer(s)
- Tamara SCHERBAK
- Producer(s)
- Christina SALIBA (MISFIT FILMS)
- Synopsis
- Ava is a 30-something art conservation student, stubborn and tenacious with a dark and twisted sense of humor, a means of dealing with a life of torment and trauma, caused by a hypersensitivity to sound that triggers horrifying mental and physical attacks. Her coping strategies are bizarre to the world around her; she never leaves home without her noise-canceling ear muffs, which are big and cumbersome, and make her stand out even more when all she wants to do is bleed into the background.
  
  These “sound attacks” cause her to witness violent imagery, descend into fits of rage, and lose chunks of time. Her peers perceive her as a freak and the medical community is entirely baffled and unable to offer her any concrete help. After a particularly ferocious sound attack during one of her classes where the lives of her classmates are put at risk, she is left feeling helpless, alienated and contemplates suicide.
  
  Refusing to give up and searching for answers, she discovers a remote museum that will be installing an anechoic chamber, the world’s quietest room, as part of an upcoming exhibition. A room designed to absorb all sound. A black hole of silence. This is it. This is her salvation. Thinking she has found a solution to her cursed life she takes an internship at the museum leaving everything she has worked for behind.
  
  As she bides her time in anticipation for the chamber’s completion, Ava becomes part of the close-knit conservation team at the museum, working on an exhibition on women’s pain and rage throughout art history. These disturbing paintings and sculptures resonate deeply with her. Obsessively working long nights on the restoration of the paintings, Ava begins to sleepwalk throughout the museum, experiencing perturbing nightmares that mix the artworks with her own past and horrifying hallucinations of her ears bleeding while she becomes more and more sleep deprived as she struggles to keep her sound attacks at bay.
  
  When her mother pays her an unexpected visit to the museum, a shocking revelation causes Ava to unravel completely and the sound attacks come back with a vengeance. An explosive and violent outburst at the museum puts her co-workers in danger, costing Ava her internship and more vitally, losing access to the anechoic chamber.
  
  Ava is left feeling ostracized and alone once again as her sound attacks escalate into a now constant presence. Desperate for relief she breaks into the anechoic chamber and locks herself in. She experiences a moment of brief euphoria but begins to hear the sounds of the inner workings of her own body. Her heart beating – the swishing of blood through her veins – the fluttering of her eyelids – the click clacking of her own joints. Her mother’s voice echoes hauntingly throughout the chamber as the sounds merge into a menacing, ear-splitting buzz causing her to descend into madness. She must make a brutal decision: end her life or find a way to live in a world alive with sound.
- Partners & financing
- Telefilm Development Funding

WHITE NOISE

Festivals& Awards

Festivals
& Awards