"Silence provides an intriguing premise for Story of an Encounter: (A pair of teenagers, an Arab boy and an American girl, who are deaf and do not speak) find a common voice in their language of silence, sign language. They share their mutual plight caused by the industrial exploitation of the boy's country: the girl's father is an oil engineer whose greed keeps him traveling around the world, and the boy's father is a chicken farmer whose greed keeps him rooted in a dubious past. It's an ingenious conceit, though at times roughly executed; the film's final wordless howl of outrage still resonates." (Peter Keough, Boston Phoenix) "Tsaki takes two chances in this film: he situates it in a wasteland, rejecting a cotton-candy landscape and (rejects as well) the automatisms of speech. The (young people), both living in their own society's marginal culture, could create the world from scratch, if allowed to." (Lizbeth Malkmus, National Film Theatre)