by Olivia Popp
Link: https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/473825
Eva Libertad’s Deaf [+], notably, doesn’t feature any sound during its opening titles. In that moment, we are briefly struck by the lingering absence of a sensory part of our world we take for granted. However, the Spanish writer-director and playwright lets that be all the didacticism that the audience is granted in her solo feature debut, which has just world-premiered in the 75th Berlinale’s Panorama sidebar. Deaf gracefully moves beyond trying to convey the experience of deafness to an abled audience and instead dives into the central couple’s conflicts about how to relate to their newborn child and the world in different ways.
Inter-abled Spanish couple Ángela (Miriam Garlo) and Héctor (Álvaro Cervantes) – the former deaf, the latter hearing – eagerly expect a baby. Libertad devotes the first 30 minutes of her film to introducing us to the loving couple’s world, including their large supportive group of friends – most of whom are deaf – and Ángela’s hearing parents who repeatedly ask her to wear hearing aids, seemingly detached from the perspective of their adult daughter. After Ángela gives birth to a hearing daughter, doubts begin to creep into her mind about being able to connect with her child and the world around her, while the couple must learn together how to navigate their changed relationship with a complex new dimension.
For nearly the entirety of the film, Libertad refuses to push audiences through an aural experience of deafness in the world, like through the – admittedly strong, but specific – sound design in a film such as The Sound of Metal. Rather, the fiction feature focuses on the deaf experience as a holistic entity, and this bit of nuance becomes important as the film goes on. Indeed, the couple’s conflict could, in many ways, be extrapolated to different experiences of crucial disconnection between partners, even when Ángela’s concerns are centred around erasure because of her disability. But still, there are specific glimpses that we feel viscerally from Ángela’s perspective, such as the moment when, deep in the throes of labour, she snatches the surgical mask away from the gynaecologist in order to read her lips, who seems blissfully unaware that her patient cannot hear her. Especially in these instances, DoP Gina Ferrer García follows Ángela closely with her hand-held camera but never in an interrogational manner, letting the audience into her world but not placing them directly in her shoes.
Garlo, who also played the lead role in Libertad’s co-directed short of the same name (which was nominated for a Goya in 2023), gives a profoundly nuanced performance as the writer-director’s centre of attention. Between Deaf‘s dramatic birth scene and the second half that sees Ángela become intensely more insecure in public settings, the actress is given time to shine in a diverse set of scenarios. The filmmaker meets the audience most effectively in the film’s stiller moments, where Ángela’s emotive state can be felt through the heaviness of Garlo’s expressions as well as the freedom that breaks through when she feels like herself in a society that often prefers to act like she’s an oddity or invisible and not, simply, a mother, wife and human.
Deaf is a Spanish production by Distinto Films, Nexus CreaFilms and A Contracorriente Films, with its world sales helmed by Madrid-based outfit Latido Films.
