Unfortunately, with a hearing writer and director at the helm – this being Tallulah and Orange is the New Black scriptwriter Siân Heder – mistakes and flaws in describing the experiences of Deaf people and CODAs were inevitable. It’s unabashed, unchallenged audism and oralism with the potential to foster damaging impressions of what are known as ‘Deaf accents’ (see the community’s strong hatred of the backhanded compliment that we “speak well for a Deaf person”). As Ruby begins private tuition with tough-loving teacher Mr Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez) to prepare for an audition at a prestigious music college, the teen tells the tutor that she “talked funny” like a deaf person when she first started school – something which, in her words, sounded “wrong” and “ugly”. Social media is already awash with one clip where this dislike rears its nasty head. In fairness, Jones does an impressive job of running through the different emotions that come with keeping multiple plates spinning as a CODA, as it were.

She’s embarrassed by how open her Mum (Switched at Birth‘s Marlee Matlin) and Dad (Troy Kotsur) are about their sex life, and angry that her brother can browse Tinder at the dinner table – but she can’t listen to music – because it’s ‘something they can all do as a family’. To make matters worse, instead of aiming her frustration at an incredibly inaccessible society, its attitudes and failure to make reasonable adjustments, Ruby appears to place a lot of the blame on her family’s dependence on her. While the antagonist of Riz Ahmed’s percussionist turned out to be his own internalised audism (that’s a prejudice towards Deaf people), Utopia star Emilia Jones’ Ruby Rossi appears to be held back by her own Deaf family – and yes, that’s as problematic as it sounds.Ī lot of the film is spent making viewers understand the very real fact that CODAs often have to interpret for their parents when a qualified interpreter isn’t available or not provided, and in Ruby’s case, she hates it, most of the time. Hot off the heels of Amazon Prime’s drummer-gone-deaf drama Sound of Metal, Apple TV+ unveiled its representative offering in the form of CODA – an English language take on the 2014 French film La Famille Bélier which follows a 17-year-old hearing Child of Deaf Adults (hence the title) who is torn between pursuing her dream singing career and her “obligations” to her family. Films about Deaf people really need to stop presenting music as the antithesis to the Deaf community.

Audism unveiled youtube movie