Signs and Gestures is a film by Itandehui Jansen, which has just received the Audience Award for Best Short Film at the Cambria Film Festival. It is the main output from practice-based research, which explored how inclusion of people with different abilities can be improved within film production, particularly for the hearing or visually impaired.
The purpose of this project was to challenge a situation in which people with disabilities are often underrepresented or misrepresented in cinema. There are only a few films that present a main character with a disability, while films that feature characters with a disability mostly cast able-bodied actors for these roles, such as Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman (Martin Brest 1992) or Alec Baldwin in Blind (Michael Mailer 2017). In addition, the narrative and film language of these films are generally intended for an able-bodied audience and do not specifically address an audience with an impairment.
Through close collaboration with participants with a visual or hearing impairment, this project explored different methods and approaches in the process of making a short film, with the intention to create more layered representations. The resulting finished short film was provided with audio descriptions and captions.
The film has at present screened among others at:
- Reel Abilities Festival in New York (BAFTA qualifying)
- SLAMDANCE (BAFTA qualifying)
- The London Short Film Festival (BAFTA qualifying)
- Kerry International Film Festival
- Bengaluru International Short Film Festival
- Festival Inclús in Barcelona
- The Extraordinary Film Festival in Belgium
