Mother knows best

Recently, there was a short film that won an Oscar, the name of this short film is "The Silent Child".  This film is roughly 20 minutes long, and follows a little deaf girl, named Libby, that has a new social worker, named Jo-Anne that comes to help teach her to communicate via sign language.  Within this film, they use a variety of techniques to show that deaf people are treated as an inferior class of human, when they are just like regular people, but just lack an effective way to communicate with most people.

One of the biggest ways that they showed this was through some of the characters.  For example, Libby's mother, who was the one that has the most interaction with Jo-Anne, and Libby throughout the film, but at every turn, she makes Libby seem like an inconvenience, she basically wants Libby to be fixed, and doesn't seem to really care about her at all.  Throughout the film, the mother is always busy, running errands, always standing, or sitting away from Libby, except for 2 times, one where she tries to take the TV remote away from Libby, and of course Libby fights back, since she doesn't know what's going on, or why she's trying to take the remote, and the other is where she kisses Libby goodbye before leaving somewhere, and Libby naturally recoils from her.  Neither one of them are positive experiences, which shows how distant Libby's mother is from her.  There are also other characters that when conversing with Jo-Anne, show lack of faith in Libby, like Libby's Grand-mother, when she's talking to Jo-Anne, seems surprised when Jo-Anne says Libby is actually really smart.  Another moment is when Libby's father meets Jo-Anne, he expresses a lack of faith in Jo-Anne's help, saying they have low expectations, and only want her to have increased confidence.

Another way that they showed this is through the music.  In many scenes involving characters that can hear, there was music playing, but in the scenes that were focusing specifically on Libby, it was silent.  There was even one scene, where when the family was together having a meal, there was complete silence, just to show what it was like in her world all the time, and to emphasize the fact that nobody paid attention to her, since during this scene, no one even so much as looked at her.  The music helped to show that the difference between Libby's world and the world of the living.  But, when it focused on her, she was still able to enjoy herself, still able to do things that everyone else did, like swimming, going to the park, regardless of whether there was sound or not.  This helped to illustrate the difference, and that deaf people are still like everyday people, but are easily ignored by those that can hear just fine.

With the use of genre, they also helped to express a very interesting idea, since it was a fictional story put into a short film, and made it seem as realistic as possible.  They basically made it so that they could say that this is a common story, not an exceptional one.  While it is such a common story, it's still widely ignored nonetheless.  You could tell that they intentionally did this, and felt passionately about this, that they wanted everyone to understand what's going on, and make a change in the how deaf people are treated.  In their acceptance speech, Rachel Shenton, the writer, and fiancee to Chris Overton, the director, Rachel signed and spoke her speech, which showed how much this issue was important to her, since she could clearly speak, which implied that she can hear, but since she signed, she's also very aware of the deaf community.  This is why they chose to do a realistic fiction of a story that is much too common, and that needs to be changed.