A stunning portrait of a mother and her partner adjusting to the most common, most life-changing event
Becoming a new parent is an often-overwhelming experience; becoming a deaf parent in a hearing world to a hearing child is an entirely new scenario.
When Ángela turns up at a beach house where her Deaf friends have gathered, they ask where her partner Héctor is. She lies, tells them their baby had a temperature so he stayed home to look after her. In response, one friend says she’d love to come on her own, to ‘check out’.
But this is the problem: Ángela has been checking out a lot since her daughter’s birth, finding reason to stay late at work, offering to cook instead of play with the child, revelling in the company of her Deaf friends. Living deaf in a hearing world has always required balance, but Ángela’s hearing partner learned to sign and could interpret for her, just as her parents had before him. Now, with a hearing baby learning about her world through what seems to Ángela to be mostly sound, connecting to the hearing world is so much more complex, and finding a place within her family is especially – sometimes painfully – difficult.
Spanish writer-director Eva Libertad conceived Deaf by listening to someone who had lived the story: her sister, the Deaf artist Miriam Garlo, who plays Ángela. From impending pre-baby fears to the chaos of the delivery room, and onto daycare cliques and the difficulty of playing at home with her child, trying to teach her about life through sign language, Deaf delivers audiences two sides of the coin in offering full audio and then heavily muted audio, which is affective technically and emotionally.
Garlo is exceptional as she gives Ángela space to be patient, conflicted, forgotten and offended. Álvaro Cervantes as Héctor is equally spellbinding as an adoring, devoted and frustrated partner to Ángela. The two share extraordinary chemistry, whether they’re starry-eyed over each other and their new baby or having an explosive argument.
Deaf is an important film and deserves every accolade it’s amassing, including Audience Award for Best Feature Film at the Berlin International Film Festival. I hope its picked up outside the festival circuit in non-Spanish speaking countries. It’d be a brilliant and inclusive addition to any cinema’s weekly showing.
Reviewed by Heather Taylor-Johnson
Deaf is screening as part of the Adelaide Film Festival.
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