Ontario Grain Farmer March 2021

34 THE SILVER SCREEN can uniquely promote a deeper appreciation of difficult, controversial topics — for example, the Holocaust (Schindler’s List), racial and sexual exclusion (Green Book), and paranoid schizophrenia (A Beautiful Mind) — through character development and storytelling. And it has done it again with SILO, a Hollywood-like feature film that is based on the realistic, deadly consequences of a topic that has perhaps never received this kind of media treatment: grain entrapment. “It’s a movie intended to raise awareness that feeding the world comes at a cost,” says SILO’s rural Pennsylvania-based producer Sam Goldberg. “People are fascinated by that. And there are not a lot of movies made about farming, or rural America in general. I think we tapped into a large, underserviced desire for that sort of story.” STORYTELLING In the 80-minute-long movie, an 18-year-old worker on a Midwest U.S. farm gets trapped trying to manually free-up grain stuck in a Lights, camera…entrapment SILO THE MOVIE Owen Roberts SCENE FROM THE MOVIE SILO. PHOTO COURTESY OF SILO FILM LLC. 50-foot-high storage bin. His potentially fatal situation sparks a rescue effort that forces his employer, family, neighbours, and authorities — specifically, two rural volunteer fire departments with opposing rescue approaches — to grapple with not only how to extract him, but also, how to put their sometimes-acrimonious relationships aside. SILO’s dramatic storyboard takes what could have been a typical instructional grain handling safety film to another level. Industry News