Deaf

Cinema as empathy machine!

Deaf, a Spanish-language film directed by Eva Libertad that stars Libertad’s own deaf sister Miriam Garlo, offers an illustration of the tension between identities in a newly minted nuclear family.

Professional potter Angela (Garlo) is deaf, and married to farmer Hector, a hearing man, and the two mostly communicate through sign language. Almost as soon as they find out Angela is pregnant, little fissures appear in the foundations of their happiness as the hearing world's old prejudices are reawakened.

Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon’s non-fiction book about parenting children different from oneself, offers the useful distinction between vertical and horizontal identities.

Vertical identities are inherited – a family name, an ethnicity, or a nationality; horizontal identities are qualities that define us which parents may have nothing to do with, such as the kinship people with autism feel with one another, or being gay or deaf.

Deaf is a bang-on illustration of how cinema can be an engine for empathy, viewers won’t need to be Deaf themselves to get what Angela is going through. It is a moving exploration of the difficulties of new motherhood, a moment that can be as full of anxiety and pain as much as joy. The performances are beautifully nuanced.

This film is F-Rated. The F-Rating is applied to all films which are directed by women and/or written by women. Find out more about F-Rating.

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