Films for Deaf and Hearing Impaired
Audiences, the 2010 Women’s Film Festival Features ASL Interpreted, Subtitled and Dialogue-Free Films
Thanks to a grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the 2010 Women’s Film Festival has scheduled American Sign Language Interpreters (ASL) for two shows: Sunday, March 14th, at 8:30 pm at the Hooker Dunham Theater, Girls on the Wall and Nora, will be shown, and on Thursday, March 18th, at 8:30 pm, The Moon Inside You. Working with Nancy Groff, of the Vermont Interpreter Referral Service at the Vermont Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Inc., these films were selected by several deaf women from the area.
In addition to the films mentioned above, on Saturday and Sunday, March 20th and 21st, at 4:00 p.m., at the Latchis Theater, the Film Festival has included a screening of Ingelore, a film about a woman, born deaf in 1924 Germany to Jewish parents. Her already problematic and short-lived education was interrupted by Kristallnacht, when she was thrown out of school. This film is subtitled for the hearing audience, since it is performed entirely in sign language. This film will be shown with three other films that are visual treats, purely visual films with no spoken dialogue, Nora, Divers, and The Last Mermaids. Other subtitled films in the Festival include Beaches of Agnes, Entre Nos, and The Glass House.
Providing ASL Interpreter services was a key focus in applying for the Academy’s grant. The deaf and hearing-impaired people living in this area deserve greater accessibility to all of the arts. It is very expensive for filmmakers to close-caption their films, so very few movies are available with closed-captioning.
The Academy Awards Film Festival Grants Program has awarded more than $3 million to film festivals since 1999, making festival events more accessible to the general public, providing greater access to minority and less visible filmmakers, and helping strengthen the connection between filmmakers and the public.
