The relationship between sign language and the recorded moving image is unique – film is the only true medium for retaining the spatial, temporal, and visual nature of sign languages. Yet this linguistic integrity remains largely unrealised, as film and television industries maintain barriers that prevent Deaf creators from accessing positions of creative authority. I address this paradox: the screen’s capacity to perfectly capture sign languages versus the industry’s oblique and persistent refusal to entrust Deaf filmmakers with creative leadership. As a researcher and Deaf writer-director with over 20 years in the film industry, I examine how hearing culture’s hegemony maintains audiocentric practices through casting, cinematography, narrative tropes, and production hierarchies. Through production studies analysis, I propose crucial distinctions between authentic deaf casting and what I call ‘Deaf authorial control’.¹ This article outlines a path toward authentic Deaf authorial control encompassing writing, directing, and producing roles – the key creative positions shaping screen texts from conception to distribution. This article challenges the current paradigm whereby Deaf stories are frequently told through hearing perspectives. This demands recognition that Deaf creators bring not only linguistic and cultural authenticity but also inherent visual approaches that benefit the artform itself, regardless of subject matter.

Screen portrayals of deafness and sign language date back to the silent era. Yet with few exceptions, widespread ableism in film industries has led to the exclusion of Deaf creators from leadership roles and barred them from exerting authorial control. This has created a chronic language barrier whereby the vast majority of sign language screen content is written, framed and edited by non-signers, giving rise to tropes and techniques that perpetuate myths about deaf experience and obscure the semantic meaning of sign language dialogue. In these cases, sign becomes ‘foreign’ – incomprehensible, inaccessible, not of the creators’ world – despite the fact that sign languages are natural languages which originate from within every country and are therefore not ‘foreign’ at all. This article traces the connections between deaf history and cinema and critiques the norms of sign language representation by directors, writers, producers and cinematographers who do not understand the sign language they are representing. Through a study of the first major film to include a signing Deaf star, Children of a Lesser God (Randa Haines 1986), it reveals the limitations of authentic casting when a screen text is crafted by individuals for whom sign is a ‘foreign’ language.

In March 1988, students of the world’s only Deaf university started a revolution that made national news. Now, the first film to document this historic uprising is screening on Apple TV+.

At the same time, American universities are grappling with the consequences of President Donald Trump’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion.

In Dune’s sandswept colonialist dystopia of the distant future, power is a force best handled – and transferred – surreptitiously. In a world of ultra-wealthy spice barons and interplanetary warfare, the greatest asset in both diplomacy and resistance is an intangible one: language. Nowhere is this clearer than in the films’ portrayal of sign language…

This guide was compiled by Deaf, HOH and hearing staff, students and interpreters at the Australian National University in 2024. Please use, print and share this guide freely across your university, school, workplace or other institution and ensure you credit Sign on Screen when citing it. Select ‘open in new tab’ for a larger view and to download the infographic or for a plain text version, click here. We urge educational institutions to incorporate these measures into all educational access provisions for d/Deaf and hard of hearing students and researchers and to pass these recommendations on to future education providers. For the original file or questions or suggestions about this guide, email gemma.king@anu.edu.au.

Since the mid-2000s, the representation of multiple languages on French screens has increased significantly. However, an understudied element of this cinema is the growing corpus of films and series in French Sign Language (LSF). This chapter explores the evolution of multilingual French cinema in the twenty-first century. Placing Indigenous multilingualism within a broader translingual context, it focuses on the 2014 films La Famille Bélier/The Bélier Family (Eric Lartigau) and Marie Heurtin (Jean-Pierre Améris) and the 2020 series La Révolution/The Revolution (François Lardenois and Aurélien Molas) to examine the relationship between French Sign Language and French through a postnational lens. The chapter explores how these LSF texts challenge received norms of Frenchness, their connection to the French language and what ‘national language’ means for a nation that was always already multilingual.

What can films in French Sign Language teach us about the French nation? From its inception in Bill Marshall’s 2012 article of the same name, cinémamonde has been concerned with borders: linguistic and geographic, internal and external. Cinéma-monde equips us to decenter the concept of French national cinema, to unthink historical, monolingual notions of Frenchness and to reconceive of francophone film-making in terms of plurality, diversity, and transcultural exchange. However, this reimagining has generally been conceived of in transnational terms, and not as a means of interrogating the inherent, original multilingualism of the Hexagon itself. This article examines contemporary French Deaf cinema through a cinéma-monde lens. It focuses on Jean-Pierre Améris’s 2014 film Marie Heurtin [Marie’s Story], about the sign language education of a deaf-blind girl in rural nineteenth-century France, critiquing the notion of the language barrier to evoke the border within. In so doing, it uses Marshall’s description of how ‘the boundaries of, say, national identification have to be understood as being reflected in the nation’s internal limits, the impossibility of being fully, purely, and unproblematically French’ (2012: 42), to critique Republican myths of monism and national language.