In a small village in southwest England, elderly Emma Tavistock nostalgically recalls a tragic episode from the past. She endlessly re-reads the letters her aunt Madeleine exchanged with her fiancé, Frank, a young student of medicine and member of the International Brigades, who disappeared on the Aragón front in the spring of 1938. At the same time, in Barcelona, Alfred, an ordinary sixty-four-year-old man, lives pretty happily, but his father’s recent death has shaken him up, leading him back to his family home. During his visit, he comes across an old book of poems by Yeats and some documents that compel him to investigate the dark roots of the silence that has been stifling his family’s daily life for years.
Narrated in two stories that unfold in parallel, in Great Britain and Catalonia, The Seeds of Silence moves between the years preceding the Spanish Civil War and the winter of 2002 in a journey through two families’ past and present, both indelibly marked by the war.
A reflection on identity, guilt and the intimately personal significance of all that which we leave behind.
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