Tag: disability

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Name Me Lawand

Language for the deaf

Name Me Lawand
Directed by Edward Lovelace
Certificate PG, 91 minutes
Released 7 July

Lawand, a young Iraqi boy, has been written off. He is different, he apparently doesn’t want to communicate with others. No one in his home country can help him. And that’s that.

Except, his parents don’t believe it. They are sure something can be done for their son, just not in Iraq. So, although all their friends and family are there, they leave the country believing it has nothing whatsoever to offer their son. And they move to the UK and settle in Derby.

Lawand’s issue is that he is completely deaf, and therefore can’t be taught in a school set up for those with functioning hearing. As such, he has no way of learning language from those who can hear. A different approach is required to enable him to develop basic language skills.

This documentary… [Read the rest at Reform magazine]

[Read my longer review on this site]

Name Me Lawand is out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, July 7th.

Trailer:

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Small, Slow But Steady
(Keiko,
Me Wo Sumasete,
ケイコ目を澄ませて)

Director – Sho Miyake – 2022 – Japan, France – Cert. 12 – 99m

The first half hour ****

The rest ***1/2

A completely deaf, young woman trains in the boxing ring at the local gym and turns professional, but when the gym’s closure is announced, she loses the focus needed to carry on – out in UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from Friday, June 30th

Young woman Keiko (Yukino Kishii from Foreboding, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2017) has suffered since birth (a title tells us at the start) from sensorineural hearing loss. She and her younger brother (Himi Sato) rent a flat in Tokyo’s Arakawa neighbourhood, where she has taken up boxing at the local gym. While her brother plays music on an electric guitar for his girlfriend Hana, in the next room, Keiko scribbles obsessively writing down her progress at the gym in her notebook.

She beats an opponent by the narrowest of margins. As the old chairman of the boxing club (Tomokazu Miura from Detective Chinatown 3, Chen Sicheng, 2021; The Outrage, Takeshi Kitano, 2010; Arietty, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, 2010; The Taste Of Tea, Katsuhiro Ishii, 2004) explains to a journalist interviewing him later at the gym, Keiko can’t hear either the bell or anything the ref says.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Name Me Lawand

Director – Edward Lovelace – 2022 – UK – Cert. PG – 91m

**** 1/2

A family leave Iraq for the UK where their deaf son can receive education appropriate to his needs, only to find themselves falling foul of the UK’s anti-immigration policies – out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, July 7th, with previews in Refugee Week – Monday, June 19th to Sunday, June 25th

As a Saturn V space rocket rises into the atmosphere, we hear a voice struggling to complete a word (and read it in the accompanying subtitles, which is at once weird, because this is a documentary film and in real life, you don’t get subtitles, and helpful, because without them most viewers, that is to say those viewers with fully functioning hearing capability, would have no idea as to what is going on. First come the letters… S… P… E… Then, slowly, the single words. SPECIAL. PLACE. NEED. NEED. “I think my brother was born in the wrong place,” comments Lawand’s older brother Rawa.

The soundtrack’s conversation by the hearing-abled moves on to skim over the story of how and why Lawand’s family came to the city of Derby in England, something it doesn’t cover at any great depth, instead showing us images from somewhere inside a car of travelling across Europe, then images familiar to any English person of moving past telegraph wires atop green fields seen from a train window.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

A Silent Voice
(Koe
No Katachi,
聲の形)

Director – Naoko Yamada – 2016 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 130m

****

Groundbreaking and innovative Japanese drama about school children, bullying, remorse, isolation and self-loathing – plays in the Annecy Animation Festival 2022 which is taking place in a 100% on-site edition this year right now in the Special Programmes section (A Special Screening for the Hard of Hearing)

Egged on by Naoka Ueno (voice: Yuki Kaneko) then later shunned by classmates for his bullying of new girl in class Shoko Nishimiya (Saori Hayami), who happens to be deaf, Shoya Ishida (Miyu Irino) stops interacting with them and withdraws. This is represented onscreen by the extraordinary graphic device of an ‘X’ over the faces of his fellow schoolmates whenever they appear. It’s a very powerful way of expressing his isolation. Five years on, wrecked with guilt about his treatment of Nishimiya, he learns sign language and decides to befriend her and to make amends…

This film may well broaden your idea of what animation is capable. It’s nothing like Disney and equally it’s light years from Japanese SF action fest Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988) although it likewise started life as a manga and concerns teenagers.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Lone Ume Tree
(Ume Kiranu Baka,
梅切らぬバカ)

Director – Kotaro Wajima – 2021 – Japan – 77m

*****

New next door neighbours pose challenges for a man with learning difficulties and his carer mother – plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2022 between Friday, 4th February and Thursday, 31st March

Chu-san (Muga Tsukaji) gets up with his alarm, saying “it’s 6.45”. He folds up his bedding into a neat pile, starts to unbutton his pyjamas. By the time he’s saying, “it’s 6.56”, he’s heading for the loo. Everything runs on a rigid time grid. There’s only two minutes for his mother Tamako (Mariko Kaga) to shave him between 7.01 and 7.03; if it doesn’t get done, she has to stop. At breakfast, she tells him, “chew 30 times.”

Outside their modest house and courtyard, an Ume tree overhangs the fence, a public hazard. One of the removal men helping the new neighbours the Satomuras move in next door bangs his head and drops a box of things, out from which, unnoticed, falls a child’s ball. The husband Shigeru (Ikkei Watanabe) tells his wife Eiko (Yoko Moriguchi) that she – or he – needs to talk to the neighbours about the tree.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Shape Of Water

Loving the alien

The Shape Of Water
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Certificate 15, 123 minutes
Released 14 February 2018

There’s a tradition in horror films and fairytales that the monster is bad. The Shape Of Water is a fairytale that features a monster (Doug Jones) who is viewed very differently by different characters. To the military security man, Strickland (Michael Shannon), it’s an affront to the image of God, in which man is created, which must be brutally subdued. To the scientist and Russian agent, Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), he’s an intelligent being from whom our species has much to learn and who should be kept alive at all costs and treated with respect – rather than killed and dissected as the authorities suggest. And to the mute cleaning lady, Elisa (Sally Hawkins), who subsequently falls in love with him, he’s someone who responds to hard-boiled eggs and Benny Goodman records, and sees her for herself rather than for her so-called disability… [read more]

Read the full review in Reform, February 2018.

Trailer:

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Josee,
The Tiger
And The Fish
(Joze
To Tora
To Sakanatachi,
ジョゼ
と虎
と魚たち)

Director – Kotaru Tamura – 2020 – Japan – Cert. PG – 99m

****1/2

A college student obsessed with fish and diving gets a job looking after a girl confined to a wheelchair – out in cinemas from Wednesday, August 11th

A disorienting opening for an anime. Bubbles. Underwater. Fish swimming. Frogmen. A male college student Tsuneo is working at a diving shop over the Summer. He dreams of going to Mexico, having plenty of time to dive and seeing the rare Clarion Angel fish.

Then, out walking late one night, the entire course of his life changes as a girl in an out-of-control wheelchair comes hurtling at him down a narrow street on a hill, flying out of the wheelchair and crashing into his arms in a frozen time special effect moment straight out of The Matrix (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999). Her horrified grandmother turns up seconds later asking the young man if he saved her.

The girl immediately accuses the boy of being a pervert who’s groping her, then that he’s following them (because his house is in the same direction they’re going). The grandmother invites him in for a meal with her grandaughter Kumiko who immediately objects to the name, preferring to be called Josee.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies Music

Sound Of Metal

Director – Darius Marder – 2019 – US – Cert. 15 – 120m

****1/2

A drummer must come to terms with a sudden loss of hearing which threatens everything he has worked to achieve – already out on Amazon Prime, in cinemas from Monday, May 17th

This is a triptych about the onset of hearing loss in the context of rock and roll, a redemptive rehabilitation to the world of deafness in an isolated rural community run by and for deaf people and an attempt after recovering one’s hearing to some extent via surgical implants to come to terms with the fact that life following hearing loss can never be quite the same again. The two hour film splits roughly into three very different sections along these three lines.

Ruben (Riz Ahmed) and Lou (Olivia Cooke) are touring the States in their RV as a two person metal band, she on guitar and vocals, he on drums. Performances on stage are loud and energetic to enthusiastic crowds. In complete contrast to those moments of adrenaline rush, Ruben’s days are comparatively quiet. His morning routine consists of getting up early while Lou is asleep, doing some push-ups, putting on the coffee, dusting the mixing console while listening to 1930s jazz, making two smoothies.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

37 Seconds

Director – Hikari – 2019 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 115m

*****

A wheelchair-bound, young woman manga artist struggles to become independent of her over-protective mother – on Netflix from Friday, January 31st, 2020

Yuma (Mei Kayama), wheelchair-bound with cerebral palsy from birth, lives with her mother Kyoko (Misuzo Kanno) who looks after her in a small Tokyo apartment. However Yuma is far from helpless with a day job as an uncredited manga artist who draws and writes the comics allegedly penned by fast rising YouTube star Sayaka (Minori Hagiwara). The uncomplaining Yuma secretly yearns for Sayaka’s celebrity, if not to actually be her at least to know what it feels like, but Sayaka bans her from attending any public events such as book signings.

Yuma starts exploring ways of going independent of Sayaka. She shows some work to Iketani (Shohei Uno) from Sayaka’s publishers who tells her that what she’s produced is good but alas too close to Sayaka’s work. Finding a bunch of porn manga magazines in a park, she phones around to see it the magazines are taking submissions and embarks on an erotic space opera series, lovingly rendered in a sequence which is not so much full animation but more like an animated peruse through pages of manga, only to be told when she goes to see a friendly editor Ms.… Read the rest