Deaf President Now! review – stirring record of student protest

‘It’s awfully hard to speech supra this large noise,” says the seat of the committee of trustees astatine a wide arts university. It’s the precocious 1980s, protesting students person unopen down the field and now, midway done a tense meeting, idiosyncratic has acceptable disconnected the occurrence alarm. But here’s the thing, Gallaudet University successful Washington DC is the world’s archetypal deaf university. The students tin person a speech conscionable good with the alarms blaring – successful motion language. But trustee seat Jane Bassett Spilman does not sign. In fact, she appears to beryllium wholly ignorant astir deaf civilization – and, dressed similar a Margaret Thatcher lookalike, each handbags and helmet hair, she is the easy-to-loathe villain of this fascinating documentary.

Co-directed by histrion and deaf activistic Nyle DiMarco with Davis Guggenheim, this is the communicative of an eight-day pupil protestation astatine Gallaudet successful 1988. Trouble started erstwhile the board, led by Spilman, appointed a proceeding idiosyncratic arsenic the university’s president, implicit 2 deaf candidates. The film’s heroes are the 4 students who led the uprising: Bridgetta Bourne-Firl, Jerry Covell, Greg Hlibok and Tim Rarus; they entertainingly interviewed here. With a blend of archive footage and re-enactments the film-makers skilfully recreate the urgency, passionateness and vigor of their protest.

In the end, the students won and Gallaudet appointed its archetypal ever deaf president, I King Jordan. Fascinating, too, is the displacement successful attitudes. What Spilman and her cronies represented was an aged mindset that deafness was thing to beryllium fixed, that deaf radical needed to helped; the students had grown up with that audism. One erstwhile pupil describes being smacked with a ruler astatine schoolhouse if helium signed, different explains that his deaf gramps told him not to motion successful public. But their procreation were done with it. Their vigor and tone of absorption are glorious.