DEAF

Synopsis

Ángela, a deaf woman, is going to have a child with Héctor, her hearing partner. The arrival of the baby triggers a crisis in the couple, leading Angela to face the upbringing of her daughter in a world that is not made for her.

Statement of the director(s)

Miriam Garlo is my sister. She’s an actress and she is deaf. A few years ago, she started thinking about becoming a mum. We talked about it a lot and she shared her fears and expectations about being a mother in a world made by and for the hearing. From those conversations came the short film DEAF, which left me with the feeling that there was still so much of Ángela’s story left to tell.
The feature film comes from that desire to take a deeper dive into the complexity of the relationship between the deaf and hearing worlds: engagement and disengagement, connection and love, but also clashes and conflicts... Something that, as Miriam’s sister, has been a fundamental part of my life and which, still today, after spending our whole lives together, continues to change shape and present challenges, like a mystery that needs to be constantly unravelled. And so, it follows that Miriam and I are always saying how, without realising it, we’ve spent our whole lives preparing to make this film.
This is where the character of Héctor comes from. A kind of copy of me, he loves Ángela and is always by her side, but when the baby arrives, the bubble they had built to protect themselves from their differences is suddenly burst. Or Elvira and Fede, those parents who just want the best for their daughter, but who don’t understand her and feel alien to the way she experiences her deafness and lives in the world. And in order to get a more in-depth understanding of motherhood within the deaf community, I interviewed deaf women who shared with me their experiences of pregnancy, birth and then raising their children.
This film doesn’t aim to be a thesis on deafness. I’ve never thought of Ángela as a representative of the deaf community, but rather as a woman who’s finding her way through motherhood, who’s trying to deal with the problems that are arising in her relationship, who has a difficult relationship with her parents and who wants her baby girl to know who she is and to love her ... and who, besides all this, is deaf. Ángela is ready for the world, but the world isn’t yet ready for her

Review

Screen International Review