Silent Short Film Focuses On The Relationship Between A Deaf Man And A Hearing Man

Image via Andrew Keenan-Bolger

We have a wonderful short film to share with you all that you’ve just got to check out. Broadway stars came together to create a film centering on the hearing impaired.

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Sign is a short film that focuses on the relationship between Aaron, who’s deaf, and Ben, who can hear.

In a little less than 15 minutes, we watch the relationship between the two from the start. We see them living separately, we see them meeting, we see them on first dates, meeting parents, fighting, going to parties, dealing with the hearing gap, and more.

All of this is to show that relationships with those who are deaf or hearing impaired is the same (though maybe a little trickier) as the dating lives of those who can hear.

The film has been around for a while now (since 2016) and made its way into 50 film festivals around the world. It even earned the 2016 Youth Jury Award at the Iris Prize LGBT Film Festival.

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Now that its done spreading its wings around the world, the film has come home online and is being shared with everyone who has a computer or a phone.

Andrew Keenan-Bolger

The film’s creator, Newsies’s and Tuck Everlasting’s Andrew Keenan-Bolger, says that he created the film to spotlight the intersection between the gay community and the deaf community.

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“Both [groups] have fallen under historical systems of oppression and have been viewed by many in the past as something that needed to be fixed or cured,” he told NewNowNext. “And yet both have managed to build an incredibly rich culture and strong identity.”

He also shared that John McGinty (Children of the Lesser God) and Preston Sadleir (Next to Normal) played wonderfully as Aaron and Ben respectively. Their performances were then matched by a winning score that played as the only audio to the movie.

“Ultimately, we decided to not use subtitles, but to compose an evocative score that would help with storytelling,” said Keenan-Bolger. “This way our deaf and hard-of-hearing audience had the benefit of being able to access the love story of these two men through sign language, and our hearing audience was able access it through the score.”

If you want to see the award winning silent short film, you can watch it down below.

h/t: NewNowNext

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