A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.
- Genre: Documentary, Drama
- Studio: ITVS, Field of Vision, JustFilms / Ford Foundation, Chicken & Egg Films, Louverture Films, Creative Capital
- Keyword: sign languages, asl, experimental, deafness, deaf culture
- Cast: Nyeisha Prince, Russell Harvard, Geovanny Marroquin, Warren Snipe