This is a short film written, directed by and starring Matty Gurney for Ad Infinitum Theatre Company's 'Where You Are' mini-festival.
Shot in black and white, this is a somewhat humorous but hugely poignant and hard-hitting film which turns the tables completely on deaf people and hearing people, as we see "normal" people being alienated and persecuted because they can hear normally, in a world where, since the 1880 Conference of Milan, it was declared that sign language is the norm and everyone should use only sign language to communicate. Special therapies and inventions / contraptions were used to inhibit and 'help' the hearing people to using only sign language and they were punished if they ever started to listen or dared to speak.
A child's first lesson at school is imagined: if a hearing child can neither listen nor speak, and has no understanding of the signs, what does he have?
Of course this is a mockumentary and the world isn't like this.. but this film has been written, directed and peformed by a deaf person in the hope that we might understand just a little bit further and more acutely the way he and many like him have been treated in the past and to a perhaps lesser extent are still stigmatised and experiencing. Gurney states that this film isn't shocking for deaf people, they all know it happened and have lived through it; and yet still in 2020, deaf people are STILL fighting for recognition, inclusion and equality.
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 31/10/20
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