I dimly remember the events at Gallaudet University covered in Deaf President Now! (2025, directed by Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim), in which the student body closed down the campus when the Board of Trustees foisted yet another hearing president on them after over a hundred years of existence. The result was a week-long stand-off in which neither side would budge and a key turning point in the struggle for disability rights. The film presents a microcosm of activism along multiple axes of oppression, and ponders questions of assimilation versus visibility, self-determination versus a permanent state of custody by an abled majority. This particular story takes place in the deaf community, but I see echoes of it running through other communities, too. The overriding message of the film and its subjects is that no one is ever going to give anyone rights; you have to take them by force.
The film itself is built on talking head interviews with the four principle leaders of the students and the deaf dean who was passed over by the board for the presidency. They mostly commenting in parallel with archival footage from the era and some reenactments to fill in the gaps. It's basically a film cast in the mode of a commercial documentary for the present moment. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel with tricky narrative structures or archly beautiful cinematography or whatever; its main innovation is the use of non-diegetic subtitles. Necessary for the narration of deaf speakers over archival footage. It'll play well on cable eventually. It is what it is, which is not adventurous. But it doesn't need to be. What it lacks in cinematic moxie, it more than makes up for in the rage and forcefulness of its interviewees and the irresistible hook of its story. Moreover, the filmmakers have lucked into a group of characters who are archetypes of activism that are sometimes--often--at odds with each other: There's the firebrand, Jerry Covell. The feminist, Bridgetta Bourne-Firl. The politician, Greg Hlibok. The go-between, Tim Rarus. And there's the compromiser who is trapped within the system, Dean I. King Jordan. Jordan is an interesting case study because he's treated with suspicion as "not really deaf" because he became deaf later in life rather than being born into it, a complaint that echos in many communities struggling with what defines their identities. All of these people retain the personalities of their youth in the present-day interview segments. The presence of all of these personality types creates a movement in microcosm that's analogous to any other civil rights movement and projects this particular story into relevance across the broader world, while maintaining focus on the elements of the story that are unique to the deaf community.
Specific to the struggle in this film: you have an activist group and a population that is united by a language that the opposition doesn't speak and a culture that is invisible to the hearing world. Deafness in this context is presented as more of an ethnicity than a disability. The protesters rightly bristle at the idea that they are a problem to be "fixed," and it's a huge step of self acceptance when Greg Hlibok takes out the hearing aid that gives him a sense of sound when he goes on Nightline late in the film. It takes him a while to catch up to that action, and he appears to shrink under the weight of the new hearing president's paternalism for a while, but when he wakes up, he's properly enraged by it.
It's rare that a movie about a specific protest has so clear a villain as this film, but boy howdy does Jane Spillman fit the bill. She was the Chairman of the Board of Trustees and oozed privilege and a Nancy Reagan-ish public image. Of course she couldn't sign. None of the board, nor their choice of president, Elizabeth Zisner, whose only qualification was that she was a nurse. She had no experience with the deaf. One wonders what the board saw in her at all, other than that she was one of them. Class loyalty is always the barrier to civil rights, and that's absolutely black and white here. That paternalism is behind every mistake they made in the stand-off. The notion that they new best the needs of a population to which they did not belong led them into misstep after misstep. They were so clumsy about it that it contributed to the striking unanimity of the protesters. They couldn't peel off any of their support, and even alienated their own poster boy when they virtually kidnapped him to speak in their behalf.
All civil rights movements harp on the value of solidarity. Deaf President Now! makes it crystal clear that the unanimity of the students who turned the university into a fortress under siege is the reason that they ultimately won their demands. This is a valuable lesson for an era when the resistance dawning to the new authoritarianism in the world is fractured and fractious. The awesome power of non-violent protest is on full display here. On a personal note, I recognize the shape of the Deaf President Now! movement in my own oppressed minority and the paternalism of the oppressors who impose their will upon us, even the urge of that majority to "fix" us. I recognize the incompetence of those oppressors, too, which gives me some hope going forward that they will make the same mistakes. In any event, it's a film whose politics resonate down the years. Its events are as galvanizing in this political moment as they were in 1988.
The Silence of My Hands (2024, directed by Manuel Acuña) is intersectional, too. An account of the relationship between Rosa Casillas and Sai Yunuen Medina, a deaf queer couple in Guadalajara, Mexico. Rosa is studying to be a lawyer--the first deaf lawyer in the state of Jalisco. Sai is a trans man. At the beginning of the film, Sai is planning a trip to the US for top surgery to begin his transition. Sai wants Rosa to come with him, but Rosa is determined to become a lawyer and help the deaf community. They are deeply in love, which is communicated in a stream-of-consciousness sequence of scenes between the two of them, sometimes on dates, sometimes being domestic, always with a beatific expression on their faces. Sai's relocation to San Francisco strains their relationship to the breaking point.
While this is a very different kind of film than Deaf President Now!, it shares with that film an awareness of the barriers deaf people face when trying to live a dignified, normal life. This is most apparent in the lack of accommodations provided to Rosa in her pursuit of her Juris Doctor, where she consistently falls behind because the lectures are often completely beyond her ability to follow. Fortunately, she has understanding professors and a steely determination. The barriers for Sai are no less daunting. When consulting with the surgeon for his top surgery, there is no qualified interpreter to communicate what he wants and he relies on a member of his family to clumsily translate between them. There's a level of cringe involved with this scene because of the their failure to understand one another. Sai is also an immigrant in a hostile land, though he has a landing spot with his brother's landscaping company, where he would be deaf anyway amid the drone of a leaf blower or lawn mower.
The way this is shot creates a kind of dream narrative tethered to an elemental force--represented in the film in a profusion of scenes set near or in water. The ordering of scenes unhitches the film from linear time. The first time we meet Sai and Rosa is at an aquarium, where the bright colors of the creatures evoke a dreamy kind of awe in both of their faces that is similar to the beatific gazes they give each other, a scene to which the film returns later once we know them better. Rosa doesn't know how to swim, so Sai teaches her. Sai gazes across the bay at the Golden Gate Bridge as he talks to her on the phone. This is a film that also uses non-diegetic subtitles, though the content of those words is often contrapunctual rather than descriptive. When the film is more grounded in the mundane, it sometimes seems brutal. The scene where Rosa and Sai pack up their furnishings to find separate lodgings is ominous and unresolved.
As a trans viewer, I have some minor discomfort with the way this lingers on the details of top surgery--there's no actual surgical footage, but the description given by the surgeon is gruesome enough. This mostly escapes the cliches of trans depictions except for this scene, which is revisits the morbid fascination cis filmmakers sometimes have with the process of transition. Otherwise, Sai is shown as a normal person going about a normal life and a normal job. The mundanity is refreshing. There's barely a discussion of his transness, nor any real push back to it, though I'm sure there must have been some.
The best thing I can say about The Silence of My Hands is that I like these people and would like to know them in real life, which demonstrates that the filmmakers have approached the story with empathy and a willingness to defer to their subjects. They've largely let these people speak for themselves, which is rarer than you might think in non-fiction filmmaking.
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