"Some deaf people want their children to be deaf too"

Special correspondent for the Berlin Film FestivalAngela and Hector have created an almost perfect world. Their love is a shell of affection and trust that makes them invincible, or so it seems until motherhood endangers this bubble of happiness. The story sounds familiar, almost universal, but director Eva Libertad adds a component that changes everything: Angela is deaf and Hector is not. The Catalan production Deaf, which premieres this Saturday in the Panorama section of the Berlinale, takes as its reference the point of view of Ángela, who is played with absolute dedication by Miriam Garlo, the director's sister and the first deaf actress to star in a film in Spain. "Society does not educate us to relate to difference or disability," says Libertad. "If I know anything about deafness it is because Miriam is my sister. It is as if, without knowing it, we had been preparing all our lives to make this film."

The two sisters had already worked on a short film of the same name that won the Goya, and which already addressed the subject that she develops in the feature film. "The story arose when a few years ago Miriam began to consider becoming a mother and shared with me the fears she felt when she thought about what it means to be a mother in a world of hearing people," explains Libertad. Among Ángela's fears there is one that she does not dare to verbalize: that the child she is expecting will be hearing and this will make the process of establishing a bond difficult. Can a mother want her unborn child to be deaf? "I can tell you that," says the director. "Many deaf people who have had deaf parents have a deaf community whose cultural values support them and they have no problem with their children being deaf, and some prefer it. For hearing people it can be shocking, but it happens." Angela's case is not so extreme. "On the one hand, she knows that if her daughter is deaf, she will have a more complicated life in certain aspects, like herself, but also that their bond will be stronger," says Libertad. "It is selfish, yes, but it is related to fears and insecurities."

In fact, Deaf At no point does she present Angela as a perfect figure, as so many fictions do, which, with the best of intentions, idealize disabled people. "Eva and I wanted to create a real person, with all the successes, mistakes and contradictions of the human being," says Garlo. And her sister adds that they did not want to create an "exemplary deaf woman" who represented all deaf women. "In any case, we wanted her to represent the heterogeneity of the group, because, like hearing people, deaf people are completely different from each other," says Libertad. It was also important to escape the victim cliché. "She is a deaf woman who is the master of her life," the director emphasizes. "She has built a world in which she feels comfortable, friends, a job, a partner... But everything explodes with motherhood."

Building intimacy

Alongside Garlo, Álvaro Cervantes embodies his partner, a character richer in nuances than his initial selflessness suggests, and he does so with absolute complicity with the protagonist. "Álvaro learned sign language a year before filming and was in contact with a deaf community," Libertad points out. The actor downplays this. "In the end, it is the language that this couple speaks, the language of their intimacy, and in that sense it was an ally throughout the process," he explains. To create the couple's bond, both actors lived together for two weeks. "Álvaro is a person with a lot of emotional intelligence, very curious in a good way, and I only had to explain myself," says Garlo. "He has been a real partner, inside and outside the film. And from Angela's place, it has been very easy to be in love with Héctor knowing that."

After the birth of the couple's daughter – represented as a moment of brutal obstetric violence against deaf mothers – differences begin to appear within the couple and tear their relationship apart with silent reproaches. "The arrival of the daughter is a challenge for the coexistence between two worlds, that of the deaf and that of the hearing – says Cervantes –. In addition, the focus is no longer only on the couple, because there is a shared upbringing. And that is when Hector begins to neglect things and realises that he still has things to learn. many relationships as a couple."

The nuances of deafness

There is a deeper interpretive work involved in the creation of Angela than it may seem. In fact, Garlo has a much more fluid diction than she shows in the film. "I am building a character, from the voice to the way of perceiving the world and developing," explains the actress, who lost her hearing at the age of seven. "I have been doing theatre since I was nine years old, and before the short film I had already worked in professional companies playing characters with various types of deafness and various degrees of hearing. I wanted to portray the diversity of the deaf community."

The film also devotes space to portraying the idiosyncrasy of this community through Angela's group of deaf friends, showing the cohesion of a group in which there are few hearing people. "If someone thinks it's a closed group, it's because they have a common language, shared values and a very visual way of organizing their life experience," says Libertad. "The problem is that to get in, you have to speak sign language; it's not like they're closed off. But no matter how much effort it takes for a hearing person to speak it, it can never be compared to the continued overexertion. I like it with deaf people; it's a safe space."

Both sisters highlight the heterogeneity of deaf people and the lack of examples they have found when it comes to building a diverse imagery from the audiovisual world. "It's very hard not to have references in which to recognise yourself and for the few that you have to be totally stigmatised," says Garlo. "And as a deaf woman, discrimination is double." That's why the actress feels the obligation to offer the new generations of deaf girls "more mirrors in which to look at themselves" that help combat the "structural violence" of a society designed exclusively for hearing people. And she makes a wish: "I hope that this film will make people more curious about deafness and that fiction will include more deaf characters who are not defined only by their condition."