Symphony of Silence

Josue was raised to carry on this legacy, yet he struggles with what his own contribution should be. The weight of expectation is immense—how does he step into the role he was born into while also forging his own path? His journey takes a turn when he meets Gordon Hempton, a pioneering acoustic ecologist who has spent the past four decades documenting the world’s most pristine soundscapes. Josue was born into an unbroken culture of listening, where your survival relies on your senses, and through Gordon, Josue discovers that soundscapes can be a vital tool for awareness, inspiration, and conservation.

Just as Josue is beginning this path, Gordon must confront a profound loss: he discovers he is losing his hearing.

After decades dedicated to the art of listening, Gordon’s degenerative hearing loss is a huge blow as he navigates not only losing his life’s work, but his connection to nature and his identity.

Passing on his knowledge to Josue becomes not only an act of mentorship but a way to ensure the Planet’s symphony has a new generation of listeners and protectors. Meanwhile, Josue’s journey is one of both growth and struggle as he navigates his multiple identities, the expectations placed upon him to help protect his homeland, and the question of what path he should pursue for his own future.

Josue and Gordon’s stories unfold between the Ecuadorian Amazon, where the Cofan battle oil extraction and deforestation, and the Hoh Rainforest in Washington State, where Gordon has recorded some of Earth’s richest sonic landscapes. In both places, the film invites us to truly listen—whether to birdsong, rainfall, or a shore crab skittering across rocks—to understand the health and harmony of a living system.

At its heart, Symphony of Silence is about the transformative power of truly listening, both for our subjects and for the audience.

I reached out to Gordon soon after and learned that his story had changed. He was losing his ability to hear. As Gordon grappled with his hearing loss, he began to mentor a young Cofán sound recordist from the Ecuadorian Amazon, Josue Borman—someone he described as the best listener he had ever met. Their relationship—between a man losing his hearing and a young Indigenous recordist learning to record his homeland – felt like a passing of something intangible, fragile, and essential.

When we first began this project, I thought I was making a conservation film—one that explored environmental protection through a new and surprising lens: sound. Noise pollution. Acoustic ecosystems. But as we continued filming, and as our relationships with Gordon, Josue, and his family deepened, the story revealed itself to be about something much more expansive.

It is about listening, but not only to the natural world. It is about listening to each other. And perhaps most importantly, listening to ourselves. It is about the pressures to become who we are expected to be, and the quiet, often difficult act of choosing one’s own path.

And at its core, it is about presence.

The kind of presence that is increasingly rare: full, embodied attention. The ability to be in a moment without distraction, to feel it as it is, to be emotionally attuned—to a place, to another person, to oneself. Through Gordon and Josue, I began to understand that listening, in its deepest form, is not passive. It is an active, vulnerable, and transformative way of being in the world.

This film invites audiences back into that kind of listening.

Whenever Gordon and Josue talk about entering into a quiet place, they talk about it as though they’re entering into another world. We wanted to emphasize that distinction through our cinematic language of the film by creating two distinct styles in the film. In the everyday, modern world, the film moves through handheld, observational verité.

But when Gordon and Josue enter places of natural quiet, the cinematic language shifts into something more immersive, transportive and ethereal. We use anamorphic lenses, locked off shots or gimbal motion, and an expansive, 3D sound design. These “silent places” are not simply witnessed. They are felt.

Sound is at the center of this experience. Working with recordings from Gordon and Josue’s archives we are building a sonic world that prioritizes presence. The film asks the audience to slow down, to notice, to attune.

Symphony of Silence is an invitation.

To be more present. To feel hopeful about our future. And to understand that the answers we seek are out there waiting for us. If we can stop thinking. And just listen.