Growing up on the outskirts of Sheffield, Hugh Brody ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but was always given to understand that the real, the perfect food came from his mother’s home, Vienna. He attended Hebrew classes three times each week but was sent off to a Church of England boarding school. Conflicted and bewildered, he sought places to which he could escape – but everywhere he discovered deep and troubling silences.
In Landscapes of Silence he takes us on his first journeys to the Arctic, a world so far removed from anything he had known as to be a chance to learn, all over again, what it can mean to be alive. The realities of the far north were a joy, but even there he found abuses of the people and the land – and voices that were deeply silenced by the forces of colonialism.
In these landscapes, human well-being appears to be both possible and impossible. Yet in memory, in the land, in the defiance of silence, he sees a profound humanity – as well as hope.
Hugh Brody is a writer, anthropologist and film-maker. After publishing Inishkillane, his classic study of the west of Ireland, he spent many years immersed in communities of indigenous peoples of the Arctic and Subarctic Canada. His books include The People’s Land, Maps and Dreams, The Other Side of Eden and a collection of short stories, Means of Escape. His films include Nineteen-Nineteen, starring Paul Scofield and Maria Schell, and a series of documentaries made in the Canadian north. He also directed Tracks Across Sand, a set of films made with the Khomani San of the southern Kalahari.
Members: Free, Online or Victoria Hall (please book online only)
Non-Members: £10, Online or Victoria Hall (you will be admitted to the Hall at 7.50pm if there is room)
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