General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Silent Forest

The Silent Forest (無聲) is a 2020 Taiwanese drama film directed by Ko Chen-nien (柯貞年) about systemic sexual abuse at a school for deaf students, adapted from real events at a Taiwanese special school. It was Ko's first feature film, opened the 2020 Taipei Film Festival, and received eight Golden Horse Award nominations, winning Best New Performer and Best Sound.¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title / director	無聲, directed by Ko Chen-nien, her debut feature¹
Basis	Real bullying and sexual assault incidents at a special school in Tainan from 2009 to 2011, publicly exposed in September 2011²
Release	World premiere as opening film of the Taipei Film Festival on 25 June 2020; Taiwan theatrical release 15 October 2020³^•⁴
Runtime	104 minutes (some festival and market listings give 108)¹^•⁵
Golden Horse Awards 2020	Eight nominations; won Best New Performer (Buffy Chen) and Best Sound¹
Box office	Exceeded NT$50 million in Taiwan, a top-ten domestic film of 2020 and the year's 6th highest-grossing domestic release⁶^•⁷
International honors	Silver Peacock Awards for Best Director and Best Actor at the 51st International Film Festival of India⁸

Spoilers

Plot

The deaf teenager Chang Cheng (張誠), played by Liu Tzu-chuan (劉子銓), transfers from an ordinary school to a school for the hearing-impaired in southern Taiwan. He befriends Bei Bei (姚貝貝), played by Buffy Chen (陳姸霏), but on the school bus he discovers the "game" played in the last row of seats: sexual assaults organized by the senior student Xiao Guang (小光), played by the Korean actor Kim Hyun-bin (金玄彬). Chang Cheng struggles over whether to expose the game's cruel truth or join it, while the boundary between perpetrators and victims blurs and the school's staff look away.⁹^•¹

A teacher, Wang Da-jun (王大軍), played by Liu Kuan-ting (劉冠廷), investigates the assaults, interviews the students involved, and eventually writes 127 suspected sexual assault incidents on a whiteboard before reporting them.⁹^•¹⁰ The school principal is played by Yang Kuei-mei (楊貴媚).⁹

The real case

The film adapts events at a special school in Tainan between 2009 and 2011, where bullying and sexual assaults among students continued while the school's staff looked the other way. The case became public in September 2011 when the Humanistic Education Foundation (人本基金會) held a press conference exposing the large-scale sexual assaults.² Reporting on the film put the number of incidents at more than 300.¹¹ According to the South China Morning Post, the events prompted Taiwan's deputy minister of education, Tsai Ching-hwa, to vow to improve reporting mechanisms for sexual harassment in Taiwan's schools.¹²

Production

Ko Chen-nien, a graduate of the Shih Hsin University graduate program in radio, television and film, had earlier co-directed the 2017 series Children of the Planet (天黑請閉眼), which won a Golden Bell Award for drama, and had her short film Nameless Horse nominated for Best Creative Short Film at the 2011 Golden Horse Awards. The Silent Forest was her first feature.¹ The project was selected at the 2019 Golden Horse Film Project Promotion under its original title 無聲練習曲 and won the Taiwan Creative Content Agency's WIP Original Award; producers were Chiu You-ning (瞿友寧) and Uilin Wang (於蓓華), with Redbit Pictures as the production company.³^•¹³ Public Television Service was among the production partners, and post-production of image and sound was done in Korea.⁶^•⁷

Casting and preparation. None of the young leads are hearing-impaired in real life. The actors spent two to three months learning sign language, and Ko also had them live with deaf people for several weeks to learn their daily habits; lead actor Liu Tzu-chuan said playing a deaf character convincingly required more than signing, including understanding deaf people themselves.¹⁴^•² This choice drew criticism from at least one reviewer: Grant Watson of Fiction Machine gave the film 4/10, writing that by excluding deaf performers in a true story it "speaks for a disabled community instead of allowing that community to speak for itself."¹⁵ The National Culture and Memory Library entry nonetheless describes the film as Taiwan's first to present sign language and deaf culture on screen.²

Reception and awards

The film premiered as the opening film of the 2020 Taipei Film Festival on 25 June 2020, one of the few large physical festivals held that year, and opened theatrically in Taiwan on 15 October 2020.³^•⁴ It became one of the most talked-about Taiwanese films of 2020, ranking as the 6th highest-grossing domestic release of the year with box office above NT$50 million.⁶^•⁷

At the 2020 Golden Horse Awards it received eight nominations: Best New Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Art Design, Best Original Film Score, Best Editing, Best New Performer, and Best Sound, and won Best New Performer for Buffy Chen and Best Sound.¹^•¹⁶ Kim Hyun-bin's Best Supporting Actor nomination made him the first Korean actor nominated at the Golden Horse Awards.¹⁶ At the 2021 Taipei Film Awards the film received eight nominations and three wins.⁶ Internationally it competed at the 2020 FILMeX festival in Japan, the Frontline section of the 2021 Jeonju International Film Festival, and the 2021 Asian Film Awards, and won the Silver Peacock for Best Director and Best Actor at the 51st International Film Festival of India.⁶^•⁸ Distribution rights were sold to Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Hong Kong.⁶

Critical response. James Marsh of the South China Morning Post gave the film 3.5/5 stars, calling Kim Hyun-bin's detached performance as the bully, with his menacing signed refrain "Let's play together", the film's most powerful element.¹² Reviewers repeatedly compared it to the Korean film Silence (Silenced), based on a comparable abuse scandal at a Korean school for the deaf, as a "Taiwanese version" of that film.¹^•¹¹ Ko said she deliberately declined to make a pure villain, instead handing the measure of right and wrong to the audience.¹⁶ After release, the production team held more than a hundred post-screening discussions across Taiwan.¹⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2020 to 2022

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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