\n<\/p>\n
E<\/span>va Libertad spent months researching the script of Deaf, speaking to deaf women about pregnancy and parenthood for her drama about motherhood and identity. Almost immediately, the Spanish director knew the film needed a labour scene. \u201cFor all the women, giving birth had been a very traumatic event,\u201d she says. She heard stories about women in labour not being informed of procedures, or having their hearing partners removed from the room, depriving them of an interpreter as well as support. \u201cI left out some of the most difficult experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n Her film gives us a frighteningly realistic birth scene. \u201cPush, push hard,\u201d shouts a doctor behind a face mask at the end of a long, drawn-out labour. The woman giving birth is \u00c1ngela, who is deaf and can\u2019t read the doctor\u2019s lips because of their face mask. Frightened and alone, \u00c1ngela lunges forward and rips off the mask. Her hearing partner is in the room. He\u2019s meant to be interpreting, but was ordered from her bedside as things began to look like they might go wrong.<\/p>\n She sees her baby joining this world she can never be 100% part of. She fears being left out<\/p>\n The common thread in all the stories Libertad heard was a feeling of desperation. \u201cIf birth is already difficult for hearing mothers, for deaf mothers it\u2019s worse. There is the feeling: how will I know if something goes wrong? A fear that anything could happen.\u201d Libertad is speaking over Zoom from her home in Molina de Segura, a town near Murcia. She used actual doctors and nurses in the scene to add realism. But no casting process was necessary to find an actor to play her lead character \u00c1ngela: Libertad hired her sister, Miriam Garlo, a well-known stage actor who is deaf.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Garlo was seven years old when she lost most of her hearing as the result of an allergic reaction. \u201cI had a severe ear infection that led to high fevers,\u201d she tells me. \u201cI was given aspirin, which contains an acid that caused hearing damage \u2013 I lost 70% of my hearing.\u201d This has now increased to 90%. \u201cAt the time, I didn\u2019t experience it as something traumatic. I was just a child. My life changed completely, but I adapted out of survival.\u201d<\/p>\n After studying fine art, Garlo trained as an actor. The sisters collaborated on a short film in 2021 also called Deaf: \u201cAt the time, Miriam was considering whether to become a mother,\u201d Libertad says. \u201cShe shared with me her fears about becoming a deaf mother in a hearing world. And that\u2019s where the short was born from.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, says Libertad, Garlo decided not to have children. \u201cBut when we wrapped on the short, I was left wanting more. What would happen if a baby came along?\u201d So Libertad wrote a feature film about what happened next. \u00c1ngela is an artist and potter who lives in the Spanish countryside with her hearing partner H\u00e9ctor (\u00c1lvaro Cervantes), and their dog and chickens. At the start of the film they are in a bubble of pregnancy bliss. The relationship looks as good as it gets; they love each other and their communication is solid. But parenthood changes their dynamic in ways that are difficult to navigate.<\/p>\n Becoming a mother, says Libertad, throws \u00c1ngela back into ableist society. \u201cAt the beginning you can see she has ownership over her own life and her own world. But with pregnancy, she once again has to face all these challenges she thought she\u2019d overcome.\u201d We see it most dramatically when she gives birth: the maternity care system is completely unprepared for a deaf woman.<\/p>\n The film also shows the day-to-day challenges. When her daughter starts nursery, \u00c1ngela finds it difficult to lipread during hurried conversations at pick-ups. A mum asks for her number for the class WhatsApp group. \u00c1ngela doesn\u2019t understand. Embarrassed, she smiles and walks away.<\/p>\n <\/span>Garlo and Libertad at the Malaga film festival. <\/span> Photograph: Sipa US\/Alamy<\/p>\n \u00c1ngela\u2019s daughter can hear, and in painful scenes \u00c1ngela begins to worry that she will be isolated from her baby and partner. \u201cShe sees her baby joining this world that she can never be 100% part of. A world that her partner is part of. So she has a fear of being left out.\u201d<\/p>\n Not for the first time, Libertad tells me that \u00c1ngela does not represent all deaf mothers: \u201cThat would be impossible. There are as many ways of being a deaf mother as deaf mothers exist in the world.\u201d Besides, hearing women have written to her to say they also identify with \u00c1ngela: \u201cThey talk about the same fear of not being a good mother, or of not fully bonding with their baby, or the fear of their baby preferring their partner over them.\u201d<\/p>\n Until I learned sign language, my identity was broken. Like it had snapped in two<\/p>\n Two days later I speak to Garlo, Deaf\u2019s star, at her home; she lives four doors down from her sister. There are two interpreters on the video call, one translating Spanish Sign Language into Spanish, the second Spanish to English. For our entire 60-minute conversation, Garlo leans into her camera, her focus sharp. In her job as an actor, she is used to concentrating on the invisible labour of reading lips.<\/p>\n \u201cWith directors who don\u2019t know sign language, I\u2019ve had to really work hard to listen with my eyes, to understand what they want, what they need in a scene,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m doing the work of interpreting. I\u2019m having to make double the effort.\u201d Which sounds exhausting, I say. \u201cIt is. It really drains my energy. Because if I don\u2019t understand the instructions for a task, I\u2019m not going to do it well.\u201d<\/p>\n Deaf shows Garlo\u2019s ability to inhabit a character completely. Her expressive face radiates happiness at the start of the film, then becomes increasingly anxious, taking on an edgy quality. It\u2019s a stunning performance. But when audiences watch the movie, they often assume she is playing a version of herself. That may be because she is being directed by her sister, but ableism is a factor too, says Garlo. \u201cSociety still doesn\u2019t understand that if you have an actor with a disability playing a character, the disability doesn\u2019t make the character. But \u00c1ngela is not me. Her life decisions are not my life decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Forced back into society \u2026 friends and family in Deaf.<\/span><\/p>\n That must be incredibly frustrating. She pulls a face as if to say that\u2019s not the half of it. \u201cYes, it is very frustrating. It\u2019s a stigma that exists towards people with disabilities, and it does bother me, because it makes it seem that I\u2019m unable to develop any kind of character who isn\u2019t exactly the same as me.\u201d<\/p>\n I read that Garlo did not learn to sign until she was 30. Is that true? She nods. Growing up, her parents didn\u2019t really know much about sign language. They were a loving, caring family, but the focus was on education and academic attainment. \u201cPeople thought of sign language just as an additional resource,\u201d she says with a shrug. Is there a sense among hearing people that sign language is somehow a lesser language, I ask? \u201cYes, completely, 100%.\u201d<\/p>\n But learning to sign changed Garlo\u2019s life. \u201cUntil I was 30, I didn\u2019t understand why life was so difficult. I had to make so much effort to lipread. But once I discovered sign language, it made everything so much easier.\u201d Did she have much involvement in the deaf community before that? She shakes her head. \u201cI had no contact with other deaf people until I was 30.\u201d<\/p>\n After school, she focused all her energy on education, studying fine art in Madrid, then a master\u2019s and a PhD. But something didn\u2019t feel right. \u201cIt was a really sad time in my life. I fell into a major depression. I felt awful. I realised that my identity was kind of broken, like it had snapped in two. I realised that I needed sign language to connect with the deaf world. I sought it out. I found the deaf world, and I finally found people who had lives like mine. I did a sign language course when I was 30. Now I\u2019m 40.\u201d<\/p>\n What did it feel like, discovering her deaf identity? Garlo smiles. \u201cI always say the first part of my life was like living in black and white. When I learned sign language, it was like the world suddenly flooded with colour. It was my salvation \u2013 finally being able to see all the colours in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Deaf is released in the UK on 12 September<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eva Libertad spent months researching the script of Deaf, speaking to deaf women about pregnancy and parenthood for her drama about motherhood and identity. Almost immediately, the Spanish director knew the film needed a labour scene. \u201cFor all the women, giving birth had been a very traumatic event,\u201d she says. She heard stories about women<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19913,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[12230,8676,1171,1394,2318,12231,3038],"class_list":{"0":"post-19912","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-childbirth","9":"tag-deafness","10":"tag-film","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-parenting","13":"tag-unflinching","14":"tag-wrong"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}