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.