The Project Making Sign Language Cinema More Accessible

Sign language cinema has been booming in recent years. More films and series in sign language have now been released since 2010 than in the century of film history before it. There have never been more Deaf and signing actors, directors and writers working in the film industry. But there are still films being made with hearing actors in deaf roles, without any Deaf representation in the production team, or that perpetuate damaging myths about deafness and sign language. 

Dr Gemma King, Senior Lecturer in French at the ANU School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics is researching how contemporary screens represent deafness and how sign language cinemas filter non-ableist perspectives.

Supported by the Australia Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Research Award, Dr King is partnering with Deaf Connect and the National Film and Sound Archive on Sign on Screen: Language, Culture and Power in Sign Language Cinemas. 

Sign on Screen is the first large-scale research project that studies, promotes and critiques global sign language cinemas. The website has just launched at signonscreen.com, and includes information about the research, partners and events, and especially the film finder – the first catalogue of all feature films, shorts, series and documentaries that have been made in all the sign languages of the world. 

Most of us have heard of at least one major sign language film or series, such as CODA, Switched at Birth or A Quiet Place. It will be no surprise that the Deaf-produced Netflix series, Deaf U, about students on the campus of Deaf university Gallaudet in the US, is mostly in American Sign Language. But you’ve probably also noticed sign language dialogue cropping up in unexpected places. Here are five films and series that you might not know include sign:

Only Murders in the Building

If you know the satirical crime comedy series Only Murders in the Building, it’s probably for its all-star cast, with Selena Gomez, Steve Martin and Martin Short. But Only Murders, set in a wealthy apartment building in Manhattan, is also remarkable for its portrayal of American Sign Language. The series features Deaf actor James Caverly as the mysterious Theo, and the series’ first season from 2021 includes an episode almost entirely from Theo’s perspective. Not only does this episode include mostly ASL, but there is no spoken dialogue at all between any of the hearing characters, either. It’s a completely speech-free episode that asks us to think differently not just about deafness, but about how we use words and how we understand silence. 

120 Beats per Minute

The 2017 French film 120 Beats per Minute, or BPM, tells the tragic but vibrant story of the Act Up Movement in Paris, and their fight for advocacy and recognition of AIDS victims in the 1990s. The film is about suffering and injustice, but also about collective community power and queer joy. Many of its scenes are realistic debate scenes at the Act Up meetings, and one of the members is played by Deaf actor Bachir Saïfi, whose impassioned contributions to the discussions via a French Sign Language interpreter show how important Deaf contributions are to public discourse, and how important interpreting access is.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

One of the biggest blockbusters to hit cinemas this year is Godzilla x Kong, a CGI-saturated monster action movie in which King Kong and Godzilla have to band together after being enemies. The film is a sequel to 2018’s Godzilla vs. Kong, and both feature young Deaf actor Kaylee Hottle in the role of Jia, a Deaf Indigenous child who teaches Kong to sign. Godzilla x Kong is part of a long tradition of movies about signing apes, which can oscillate between showing the power of sign, and flattening the complexity of the languages of Deaf communities.

Baby Driver

An action thriller with one of the best soundtracks of recent years, 2017’s Baby Driver tells the story of Baby, a getaway driver with partial hearing loss and severe tinnitus – or ringing in the ears – that he sustained in the car crash that killed his parents. Baby is not exactly Deaf, but he often relies on lipreading as he plays loud music in his earbuds at all times, to mask his tinnitus. He communicates in sign with his Deaf foster father, played by iconic Deaf actor CJ Jones, who also wrote the fictional sign language used in Avatar: The Way of Water. 

Drive My Car

The 2021 Japanese film Drive My Car was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and with its unique and profound human story it’s easy to see why. It’s about the grieving director of a multilingual theatre production, and his uneasy friendship with his personal driver. Each actor in his play is from a different Asian country and performs their role in their native language. One of these is the South Korean actor, Lee Yoon-A, who communicates in Korean Sign Language. Yoon-A is a hearing woman but is nonverbal for reasons that are never explained. Like Baby Driver, the film shows us the diversity of people who use and rely on sign.

Visit the Sign on Screen website to find your next favourite movie, or maybe even your next project, be it in research, industry or community work. The data is there to be accessed and used for free.

See the Auslan (Australian Sign Language) version of this article below, with English captions, from Sign on Screen partner Ramas McRae: