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Now Silence
In this superbly researched WW II film, award-winning writer, Tori Warner Shepard and Co-Writer, T.C. Warner capture the mood of remote Santa Fe, New Mexico as it prays for the return of her men held in Japanese Prison Camps. Eight hours after Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Japanese attacked the Philippines and four months later, the 1800 men from New Mexico were surrendered to the enemy. Of them, Melo Garcia is the last living hope to continue his family’s long line and LaBelle, his novia, is back home faithfully waiting to marry him. She learns that he has survived the Bataan Death March but his father and brother have not. By the end of the war, she understands how for three and a half years, he has been sick, beaten, and starved.
When the second atom bomb decimated Nagasaki, Melo Garcia was twenty miles away in Fukuoka Camp #17, Omuta, outside Nagasaki, Japan. Could he have been exposed to radiation?
Too, war has altered the flavor of the still isolated mountain town. With the men off to war, diverse groups have settled in seeking a safe haven. The settled Indians, Hispanics and artists now have to contend with religious fanatics, and FBI agents all glancing warily at the Manhattan Project scientists who are here working on the top-secret atomic bomb not to mention the 2000 Enemy Aliens in the Japanese Internment Camp a mile to the west drinking home-made sake.
Another outsider, red-headed Phyllis, a self-styled bombshell lands in town with visions of romance and adventure. Accustomed to taking what is not hers, she crosses cultural lines by seducing war-torn and damaged Melo away from his family and his promise to La Belle.
This film explores the courage of the Hispanic soldiers, the Wartime home front and its many new influences during those war years and the anguish of a fierce community struggling to hold on to tradition of family solidarity against the devastation the POWs suffered from the atrocities of captivity.
For Melo, La Belle, and the others, WW II was not the last and final friction.
Director: Philippe Mora
Producer: T.C. Warner
Writers: Tori Warner Shepard & T.C. Warner
(*credits not contractual)
