‘Deaf President Now!’ Review: Spirited Doc Communicates Why a Turning Point for Deaf Rights Still Matters
The “now” in “Deaf President Now!” refers to the second week of March 1988 — when the students of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., united in protest of the board’s choice of a non-deaf candidate to lead the school. But the activism depicted is still relevant to identity-centric struggles today. For 124 years, the school had operated under an ableist set of assumptions, treating deaf and hard of hearing people as needing “help” from patronizing outsiders. But in the seven days depicted here, the students took charge, teaching their elders — and anyone who would listen — not to underestimate them.
A collaboration between deaf actor-advocate Nyle DiMarco and “An Inconvenient Truth” director Davis Guggenheim, the propulsive nonfiction story feels as inspirational as any scripted feature, reuniting the four Gallaudet grads who organized the movement to describe events in their own words — words of passion, dynamically signed on-screen and spoken aloud by unseen actors. The result is strategic in the way it uses and occasionally withholds sound, recognizing that members of the Deaf community will experience it differently, and occasionally putting that audience at an advantage (as in a muted TV interview that only lip readers can follow).
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The film premiered at Sundance, a deaf-inclusive festival where another new documentary, “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore,” touched on the same story. Although Matlin was directly involved in a major moment depicted in “Deaf President Now!” (in reality, she appeared alongside Gallaudet student body president Greg Hlibok in the “Nightline” episode that brought the issue to national attention), the Oscar-winning actor oddly goes unmentioned here.
Instead, the focus is on the four students — Hlibok, Jerry Covell, Bridgetta Bourne-Firl and Tim Rarus — who led the movement, after learning late on a Sunday that the board of trustees had selected Elisabeth Zinser from among three candidates (two of them deaf men) to lead the university. Covell was a tall and charismatic young man who stood up and galvanized the crowd, which had gathered near the university’s front gates to learn the board’s choice, printed on pamphlets and passed around.
The filmmakers embrace the Errol Morris style of re-creation, using high-impact inserts — flashing lights, beating drums, a faceless student tearing open a box of flyers — to evoke the excitement of that night from a deaf POV. Surely aided by postproduction tools, the sound of the crowd makes an impression in this scene, as a clamor rises from among the deaf students. Some were ready with banners, while others lit the pamphlets on fire. Editor Michael Harte re-creates this scene via archival photographs and news footage, favoring moving cameras and dynamic angles.
Fortunately, the media was paying attention that night, documenting the demonstration — and later giving the directors plenty of visuals to work with. Cameras were rolling as Covell instructed the crowd to sit, simultaneously signing and shouting above their heads. A film like this craves a villain, and one emerges that night in the form of board chair Jane Bassett Spilman, a rigid New England aristocrat who was dining at a fancy hotel nearby when the decision dropped. Looking bewildered by the crowd of angry students, but also insultingly disinterested in their perspective, she is quoted as saying, “Deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world.”
Whether or not Spilman spoke those words, this new generation of deaf youth not only was ready, but felt that audist thinking had held them back too long — a view driven home during a meeting on Monday between Spilman and the students in the Gallaudet Field House, when someone pulled a fire alarm. “It’s awfully difficult to talk above this loud noise,” Spilman said into the microphones, underscoring both her bias and a shocking inability to use sign language. Of course, the deaf students could easily communicate under such circumstances.
Central to the students’ argument was the fact that neither Spilman nor Zinser (nor most of the board) had experienced deafness themselves, and therefore did not understand their world. Woven throughout the film are illuminating insights into how doctors and scientists have engaged with deaf people over the decades. Many of them — including Alexander Graham Bell, whose wife and mother were deaf — saw the condition as something to be fixed, advocating for tools that could make deaf children hear and academic curricula designed to encourage speech.
A former nurse (and secondary antagonist in the film), Zinser is presented as the latest example of such ableist thinking, whereas the students wanted one of their own, supporting I. King Jordan, a Gallaudet graduate who was serving as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. But Jordan, who simultaneously signs and speaks his interview for the film, was not born deaf, and some saw him as an outsider, introducing further conflict into the documentary’s retelling of events.
Rather than presenting the four students as a unified front, the filmmakers lean into their differences of opinion, inviting the five subjects (Jordan and the so-called DPN4) to comment on one another. While voice actors like Tim Blake Nelson translate their words, the interviewees have different ways of expressing themselves, and the film encourages audiences to read between the signs.
Covell communicates via grand, animated gestures, while Hlibok and Rarus were taught to sign in a smaller box (incidentally, Hlibok’s son Charlton plays him in a dramatic re-creation of the “Dateline” interview). Bourne-Firl, the only woman interviewed, was a former cheerleader with a dynamic personality. Early on, her allegiances are torn between her support of her deaf classmates and the feminist win represented by a woman being chosen to lead the university.
A pulsating original score amplifies the film’s dramatic tension for deaf and hearing audiences alike, though one song, ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” captures the optimism of a movement that has only gained momentum since.
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