Deaf

Adaptation of the short film of the same name

Eva Libertad is a Spanish screenwriter and director, also a sociologist, graduated from the Complutense University of Madrid. Co-founder of the production company Nexus CreaFilms alongside Nuria Munoz Ortiñan, she develops an engaged work, at the crossroads of the intimate and the political. She was revealed in 2021 with the short film “Sorda”, the first work in sign language nominated for a Goya Award. She then directs the adaptation into a feature film, presented at numerous international festivals and honored at the 2025 Berlinale with the Audience Award in the Panorama section. Her cinema explores with sensitivity and radicality the issues of gender, inclusion, and representation, asserting a unique voice in the landscape of contemporary Spanish cinema. In this adaptation of her short film of the same name, Eva Libertad stages her own sister, Miriam Garlo, who became deaf following an illness, and even appears in the film suffering from the same disability.

A mixed couple

The film tells the story of her sister. Angela is deaf, Hector is hearing. They form a fulfilled and happy couple despite their differences. But the birth of their first child worries Angela: will she be able to create a bond with her daughter? How to learn to become a mother in a world that so often forgets to include those who do not hear? The film is therefore very original, just as the short film “Sorda” was, entirely in sign languages. In order to include all audiences, the feature film is in turn offered with subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing. It will also be available in audio description. And, especially in the second part of the film, after the birth of her daughter, Angela will increasingly use sign language to teach it to her child as quickly as possible in order not to be left behind in the world of the hearing, since her husband is hearing, and all the fears around this disability for her daughter are dissipated and that she is declared hearing. Angela had to endure the double punishment: before and even after the birth, she had to face her anxieties about the possible deafness of her child, and afterwards she suffers from feeling excluded from their relationship and feeling her child detach from her because of deafness once again.

When the child appears

The central theme of the film is therefore this handicap in a society of hearing people and how to escape it. The director, for this, was confronted with several problems. Especially the way to film the characters who “sign” and, with her director of photography, Nina Ferrer, they did very well. The other difficulty was to make the hearing viewers feel the difficulties for the deaf to apprehend the world and its different sounds, from the beginning of the film, but especially during the last quarter of an hour where the sound is distorted and very muffled to put us in the situation of someone who hears very poorly or not at all. In the end, it is a very successful film that received no less than seven Goya Awards. It is the director who best summarizes how to feel this very beautiful film: “It was at the Berlin festival that a deaf audience saw the film for the first time. For them, there was no impact; they simply recognized that their reality is like this. For me, as a director, and for Miriam, as an actress, it was very important not to try to represent all deaf women through the character of Angela. It is a character with strengths and weaknesses, who was never meant to be exemplary. Above all, she should not become a standard, until the end we wanted her to be free.”