International Association of Deaf Media Professionals Founded
By Mike Ervin (Mervin4241@aol.com)

On the opening night of the second annual Festival of Cinema for the Deaf in Chicago, the International Association of Deaf Media Professionals was born. David Pierce , a deaf film maker, television producer and movie historian from Texas made the announcement before a crowd of about 150 to start the festivities at the Carnegie Theater.

Pierce says it's been his ambition for many years to form a trade organization similar to the National Association of Broadcasters, through which deaf people in the media arts could assert collective influence in the industry. "What we need is to be able to show the industry that we have many qualified professionals, " says Pierce.

He wants the IADMP to not only makes it easier for artists like those whose work was featured at the festival to find each other and find money for projects but to create more mainstream visibility for their work and talents. This, he hopes, will eventually reap many benefits in addition to more work for deaf people. He hopes it will lead to more captioned films and more sign language on screen.

"We want it to be a conduit for deaf people to educate the hearing population about our culture. We want to preserve our culture on film and television. A hearing person has the printed word. But our language is alive by being on the hands and the way to preserve that is on film and television." Pierce says deaf culture is expressed and preserved through visual story telling. "The silent movie era was the pinnacle of visual story telling. They didn't rely on sound so deaf people at that time really had complete access. The title cards were our captioning at the time."

The Chicago Institute for the Moving Image, which organizes the festival, will be the umbrella organization for IADMP. CIMI director Joshua Flanders says the new trade organization's annual meeting will be held at all future Chicago festivals. But even though the 2003 festival was a forum for political organizing, much of what was shown on the screen was decidedly apolitical. Deaf British film maker William Magers had four of his short film selected for the festival. All featured deaf actors using sign language but none had anything to do with being deaf. "I think it's important to make a film featuring deaf people that's not about deafness," he says.

Magers said he went to the deaf film festival in Wolverhampton, England and he was bored. "It was very serious. All about issues. Talking, talking, talking." They were angry, humorless films about "deaf power," he says. "So I said, 'Let's have a bit of fun.'"

His film "Waterfront" is a tight, shadowy remake of eight minutes of the classic movie "On the Waterfront." He previously he wrote the script for Reservoir Wolves," which was another deaf director's remake of part of the movie "Reservoir Dogs."

Issues vs. entertainment
Pierce says, "There are two categories of deaf film. One category is films about deafness-- about the struggles of cochlear implants, access issues, the problems of deafness. The other category is films not about deafness but that use deaf actors and signing. The script has nothing to do with deafness. Sometimes deaf people need a break from being deaf. When I'm home with my friends, I don't want to talk about deaf issues. It's boring. I want to talk about football, about the cheerleaders, how big their hooters are.

"We know what it's like to be deaf. The first category is good for the hearing population. It teaches them. That category is necessary. But it's also overdone. They're not doing enough in the entertainment category. Those films show that we are people too. I think this helps the hearing population relate to deaf people better."

Pierce's produced the promotional video for the festival and contributed to this year's lineup a charming interview with the late Chicago deaf community leader Jerry Strom, scored by ragtime piano music. But the other films he's been making lately haven't been about deafness. Not long ago he shot video of dogs romping in flood waters. He used captions to translate what the dogs said to each other into human English.

Pierce says it's not important to him whether or not those who watch his films know he's deaf. "I just want people to enjoy the film."

Creating deaf popular culture
Magers says he doesn't think his work would be much different if he wasn't deaf, except there wouldn't be deaf actors signing. The promotion of deaf culture is not a high artistic priority for him. "Deaf people like popular culture. That's one thing I'm trying to do is create deaf popular culture." Flanders thinks the widening breadth of subject matter is an evolutionary step forward for deaf film makers and festivals. "I think you see a lot of the same things at starting festivals, like gay/lesbian. The first movies that are played are angry movies about gay power or whatever. But then over time the movies change and become just comedies and dramas and love stories."

But I think the conscious avoidance of disability subject matter by artists with disabilities has its limits too. Often, the sharpness of our work comes from the uniqueness of our perspective. When we insist on looking beyond our experience for stories, we miss many of the best stories of all. And these stories will go forever untold unless we tell them.

Stories about the struggles of living with a disability are only one-dimensional and humorless in the hands of bad story tellers. Some of the films at the Chicago fest, such as the full-length feature "I Love You" by Yutaka Osawa of Japan, accepted the challenge of bringing out the full richness of the disability experience. Osawa is a hearing person but his film about a child's relationship with her deaf mother was full of humor, sadness and joy. That type of work to me has the deepest resonance and represents the finest of what disability arts festivals like these have to contribute.