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No two signs look exactly the same. Such is one memorable lesson from the slick but powerful documentary Deaf President Now! The film is a portrait of the 1988 protests at Gallaudet University, Washington DC — the world’s first higher education facility for deaf and hard of hearing students. At that point in what was already a more than 120-year history, a new president was to be appointed. Two candidates were deaf. The trustees duly gave the job to the only hearing candidate, who also didn’t know sign language. The alleged justification? “Deaf people cannot function in a hearing world.”
What followed was a week of vibrant, noisy, not un-militant protest, that soon drew in the media and politicians. Co-directed by David Guggenheim and actor and deaf activist Nyle DiMarco, the new film reassembles the student leaders. Among them is one-time firebrand Jerry Covell, still a charismatic presence who explains on camera that he signs with wide, physically expansive motions. The detail is fleeting, but captures the deaf community as one made up of endless individuals, and the sense of a long-silent voice being raised. Covell is not the only former Gallaudet student to speak of a deaf parent literally kept out of sight of the hearing. They just took it, he says sadly. His hands leap into the air. “But I have a story to tell.”
★★★★☆
On Apple TV+ from May 16
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