Meet Me in Silence

ABOUT

Fueled by equal parts fear and curiosity, a filmmaker undertakes a year-long experiment sitting in silence and darkness with strangers in the extreme quiet of a room engineered to absorb all sound.

SYNOPSIS

Meet Me in Silence is a contemplative documentary short that follows filmmaker Lucy Mathews Heegaard’s year-long inquiry into the surreal silence of an anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Holding the Guinness World Record as the “Quietest Place on Earth,” this engineered chamber absorbs nearly all sound, creating an extreme environment of silence not found anywhere in the natural world.

For a year, Mathews Heegaard sat monthly in complete silence and darkness with a small group of strangers for an hour each time. While her investigation began out of curiosity and fear, it became a catalyst for awareness, healing, and a deep connection to self and others.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

My initial question was simply whether I could tolerate extreme silence for an hour without losing my mind as myth makers on the internet warn. On my first visit, I not only found that the myths about such silence were hype, I also became aware of an entirely new landscape of sounds: the inner workings of my own body.

I was hooked immediately and wondered how my relationship with this rare kind of silence might evolve if I made it a regular practice. My new question became: what can silence teach me?

Over the course of a year, I sat in the chamber for an hour each month with a small group of strangers, different every time. If the option to sit alone had been less expensive, I would never have chosen the group experience. The thought of being closed in a ten by twelve foot room with people I had never met was almost as daunting to me as the prospect of the silence itself. Little did I know that the shared aspect of the silent experience would lead to my deepest epiphanies.

Through this film, I invite audiences into a sensory experience that encourages attention and curiosity about silence not as an absence, but as a powerful, shared presence.

DIRECTOR’S BIO

Lucy Mathews Heegaard is a filmmaker and an interdisciplinary artist. Born in New York City, and raised in Alabama, she has lived in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul Minnesota since the late 1980s.

Mathews Heegaard uses multiple forms of media to weave an immersive, intimate, visceral story experience for viewers.

In 2023, Mathews Heegaard pivoted careers at the age of 58, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Other film credits include: Diplophonia | A Diary of Voice Loss (2024) and Maternal Fabric (2024).