Artistic License Films
in association with
Ronald Guttman
and Nora Coblence
presents
If you could make your deaf child hear,
would you do it?
The choice is not so simple...
Directed by Josh Aronson
Produced by
Roger Weisberg
2000/35mm/color/80mins/Flat/1:85/Dolby SR
Distribution
Contact:
Publicity Contact:
Artistic License Films Donna Daniels Public Relations
250 West 57th Street, Suite 606 1375 Broadway, 21st Floor
New York, NY 10107 New York, NY 10018
Tel: 212.265.9119 Fax: 212.262.9299 Tel: 212.869.7233 Fax: 212.869.7114
info@artlic.com
SYNOPSIS
SOUND AND FURY explores one family's ongoing struggle for identity in the seldom seen world of the deaf.
Through the eyes of Heather Artinian, a precocious six year old, we are witness to a family battle over a controversial medical device, the cochlear implant, which would help Heather to hear. Some of her family members celebrate the implant as a long overdue cure for deafness while others fear it will destroy their cherished sign language and way of life.
Heather's two brothers and her parents,
Peter and Nita Artinian are all deaf.
Peter is an outspoken leader of the anti-implant Deaf community on
Long Island, and his world is turned upside down by his daughter's desire to
hear. Peter and
Nita suspend their long-standing opposition to the implant, but they
discover that implanted deaf children are often mainstreamed into the
hearing world. They become afraid that with an implant their daughter would
reject American Sign Language
and Deaf culture. The family
conflict escalates when Peter's hearing brother and his wife learn that
their newborn child is deaf and decide to implant him.
The battle reaches a heated climax as the hearing members of this
extraordinary family fight for
Heather's right to be part of the hearing world, while deaf family members
fight to preserve her deaf identity.
CREDITS
Director............................................................................................JOSH ARONSON
Producer...........................................................................................ROGER WEISBERG
Editor.................................................................................................ANN COLLINS
Original Music
Composed, Arranged, and Produced by.....................................MARK SUOZZO
Coordinating Producers.................................................................JACKIE ROTH
JULIE SACKS
Production Manager.......................................................................DEBORAH CLANCY
Camera..............................................................................................BRIAN DANITZ
KENNYGRONNINGSATER
MEAD HUNT
GORDY WATERMAN
BRETT WILEY
Sound.................................................................................................JOSE AVILES
DANIEL BROOKS
BRIAN BUCKLEY
FRANCISCO LATORRE
JOHN MURPHY
ROBERT REED
JUAN RODRIGUEZ
DEAN SARJEANT
Production Assistants......................................................................STACEY BARNETT
ALICE BERTONI
MARY CONNER
BILL D'AGOSTINO
Production Interns...........................................................................PATRICK BOYTON
JAMES DEAN
TED GESING
LAUREN HARDER
PAULA KLING
BARBARA KOPELOFF
ROSS TROYAN
CHEN-HSI WONG
Production Associate.......................................................................JESSICA EISBEIN
Assistant Editor................................................................................ALJERNON TUNSIL
2nd Assistant Editor........................................................................SHASHWATI TALUKDAR
Additonal Editing.............................................................................SHARON SACHS
On-Line Editor..................................................................................JON FORDHAM
Sound Editors...................................................................................DANNY CACCAVO
DOW McKEEVER
MARSHA MOORE
Post Production Sound Mixed by..................................................DAVID JAUNAI
DOW McKEEVER
Title Design by.................................................................................CHARLIE LEVI
Interpreters...........................NANCY ANGERMAIER BARBARA LANMAN
LISA DeMARCO MARY GRACE LIPSKI
SHIRLEY PENCE GAMBER RICHARD RUBIN
ROSALIND HITCHMAN MARA ZUCKERMAN
JO ANN KRANIS
Voice Over Casting..........................................................................LIZ LEWIS
Casting Assistant..............................................................................ELIZABETH BUNNELL
Voice Over Performers...........JAMIE LEIGH ALLEN KARL KATZ
JEMMA BRAHAM JOHN KAUFMAN
FREEDA CAT ANN LENANE
SCOTT DAVIDSON PHILLIP NAMANWORTH
RUTHANNE GEREGHTY VERONICA NASH
JOHN GRIFFIN SAUL NATHAN-KAZIS
BARBARA HEREL ALLISON WEISBERG
DAVID JACOBS LIZA WEISBERG
Executive in Charge of Production
for Thirteen/WNET.........................................................................STEPHEN SEGALLER
Special Thanks
SUSAN CHEFFO
JUDY HARRISON
AARON MENDELSOHN
------------------------
FUNDING PROVIDED BY
Charlpeg Foundation, Inc.
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Deafness Research Foundation
Ira W. DeCamp Foundation
Herman Goldman Foundation
Kapoor Charitable Foundation
Mr. and Mrs. W. G. Keinath, Jr.
------------------------
Jacob and Charlotte Lehrman Foundation
Robert and Dale Rosen Charitable Foundation
Jonas Salk Foundation
Silverweed Foundation, Inc.
Soros Documentary Fund of the Open Society Institute
Spunk Fund, Inc.
Ms. Julie Talen
------------------------
Executive Producer
JOSH ARONSON
THE FILMMAKERS
JOSH ARONSON has directed and produced films in almost every area of the film business in the past 15 years. He is presently in production on FEELIN NO PAIN, a documentary feature about doo-wop music featuring Kenny Vance and the Planotones. Through his own company, Aronson has directed hundreds of television commercials and MTV videos across America, and through his relationship with Michael Apted’s Beechurst Films in London, he has directed widely in Europe as well. Most recently Aronson directed a television special and a dramatic pilot for Nickelodeon, and was the director of 16 episodes of the Outward Bound series for the Discovery Channel. Aronson has won many awards including Ace awards, Clios, a New York Industrial Film Festival award and the Public Service Award of Excellence in Film. Prior to working in film, Aronson was a freelance still photographer and worked as a correspondent for Time/Life. He's had one-man still photography exhibitions at the Loretta Hilton Gallery and the Mark Twain Gallery. Aronson attended New York University Film School and the Interlochen Music Academy (piano) and holds a BA in English and Music from Columbia University. He studied acting with Stella Adler and Ivan Kronenfeld in New York, and directing at AFI and the Mark Travis Directing Lab in Los Angeles.
ROGER WEISBERG joined Thirteen/WNET in 1977 as a producer of the Emmy-winning series, HELP YOURSELF. He produced dozens of programs on a broad range of subjects including aging, domestic violence, juvenile justice, consumer fraud, health care, the environment, child welfare, and urban poverty. Since 1980, he wrote, produced, and directed twenty documentaries through his independent production company, Public Policy Productions. These documentaries have won over sixty awards including Peabody, Emmy, and duPont-Columbia awards. While all of Weisberg's documentaries ultimately were broadcast on national public television, his 1993 feature documentary, ROAD SCHOLAR had a broad theatrical release before airing on PBS. The film won top honors at dozens of domestic and international film festivals before it was released in theaters across the country by the Samuel Goldwyn Company. The feature documentary won a Peabody award after it premiered on national public television in 1995, and television networks in 8 foreign countries subsequently broadcast ROAD SCHOLAR. Since the theatrical release of ROAD SCHOLAR, Weisberg has written, produced and directed SEX, TEENS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS; OUR FAMILIES, OUR FUTURE; WHAT'S AILING MEDICINE; MAKING WELFARE WORK; SEX AND OTHER MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH; ENDING WELFARE AS WE KNOW IT; and A FAMILY GROWS IN BROOKLYN. His current production, THE MAIN STREAM, follows humorist Roy Blount Jr. on a whimsical offbeat journey down the Mississippi River in search of the literal and metaphorical "mainstream" of America.
JACKIE ROTH, Coordinating Producer, was born to deaf parents, signed from birth, and learned to lip read and speak extraordinarily well. Thus she functions equally well in the hearing world and the Deaf Culture world into which she was born. Jackie has experienced firsthand the conflicts and issues raised in SOUND AND FURY, making this documentary a work of passion for her. She has been an educator, administrator and consultant in the field of deafness, having trained many professionals in the area of communications and deafness. She has provided consulting services to corporations such as AT&T and non-profit entities such as Covenant House, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and the U.S. Forest Services. She has served on numerous Boards and at present is on the Board of Technology Related Assistance for Individuals with Disabilities (TRAID). Jackie also chaired several national conferences for Gallaudet University and organized one of their largest Deaf Awareness Festivals. She has equally devoted her career to the creative arts as an actress, director, and arts administrator. She has performed major roles for network prime time television
programs and commercials. Jackie was Artistic Director for the New York Deaf Theater and performed the starring role in the Tony award winning play, Children of a Lesser God. Married to a hearing attorney, Jackie understands and lives in both the deaf and hearing worlds. She holds a Master of Arts in Deafness Rehabilitation from Gallaudet University and is a graduate of the NYU Film Program.
DIRECTOR’S
TAKE
by Josh Aronson
SOUND AND FURY was a film that found me. I’d been directing, commercials, rock videos and television shows for 10 years but I wanted to make a feature length documentary film and was searching for a subject that would totally engage me. I happened to meet a deaf woman who had just gotten a cochlear implant and she proudly reported that she could talk on the phone for the first time in 30 years. That was certainly dazzling, but when she told me her deaf friends of 20 years had rejected her after she got the implant - that very real human drama grabbed me.
After six months of research I started shooting a documentary about the cochlear implant as the climax of the 250 year old battle between deaf people who lip read and speak and those who sign. As I got deeper into the film I realized my life would be a lot easier working with an experienced producer. I began looking around and when I showed footage to Roger Weisberg he loved the story and agreed to sign on as producer. Roger had made many documentaries for television but his film ROAD SCHOLAR, had a terrific theatrical life as well, which was something I wanted for SOUND AND FURY. Roger and I worked well together and it was great having another filmmaker to brainstorm with.
I had originally intended the film to include five deaf individuals each representing a different identity choice within the deaf experience; the range included signing deaf people who cherished their deafness and wouldn’t become hearing even if they could, people who hated being deaf and would do anything to overcome their communication limitations, and people who were taught to live orally but who found life in the hearing world so frustrating that they switched into the signing deaf world. It was also important to depict the painful struggle that parents face as they confront identity choices for their deaf children. When we found the Artinians we hit pay dirt. Here were two families headed by two brothers that had deafness running through three generations. We filmed for a year and a half as the families struggled with dramatically different choices about how to raise their deaf children. It became clear that the Artinians’ battle over the implant was a perfect reflection of the controversy we’d been filming all over America and theirs was the story of SOUND AND FURY.
Shooting scenes with signing deaf people is a unique challenge. I took some sign classes during production but like any language it takes a long time to become fluent so during interviews I needed a sign interpreter next to me to sign my questions to the subject. We needed to hear what the signers were saying on set so in addition we had another interpreter watching a monitor from another room speak an instantaneous English interpretation. This translation was fed to our headphones and recorded on one channel. Of course, our sound recordist was always on set recording ambient sound on channel two. Sometimes this system took on wild proportions as we filmed groups of signers and had several interpreters speaking for different subjects. In some cases it was hard to know who was saying what so the cameraman often had to fly blind. After filming the most complex of these scenes - 15 native signers with hands flying across a table – I remember gulping and thinking how tricky the editing of this scene would be. It turned out to be an important one.
All of these “scratch” translations were scrutinized on a vhs dub by Jackie Roth, our native-signing Coordinating Producer, who filled in the interpretation and corrected errors and omissions that are impossible to avoid in a simultaneous translation. Jackie’s re-interpretation was a guide for editing but ultimately Jackie and a second interpreter re-checked every signing scene for accuracy before it was locked.
Even though the intention was always to release SOUND AND FURY with subtitles so deaf people can view it, Roger and I knew early on that we would use voice-overs for the signing characters as well. We didn’t want to diminish the emotional power of the signing scenes and knew that voice-overs would keep the audience more engaged than reading subtitles. Also, we wanted to cut away from signing interviews to other images in the same way we do for speaking characters. It would be disorienting to a hearing audience to have subtitles over those scenes. After a year and half with the Artinians, I knew my characters well enough to feel confident that I could interpret their feelings and emotions through an actor’s voice. I spent a long time casting these voices to make sure each one was true to the signing people they would voice for.
SOUND AND FURY is a film that delves deeply into the world of the deaf but the issues at stake are universal and my goal from the outset was to make a human drama that would speak equally to all viewers - to make a film that would, in all matters, encourage understanding, tolerance and acceptance of personal choice.
PRODUCER’S TAKE
by Roger Weisberg
I was in the middle of producing and directing two documentaries - one on welfare reform and another on children in foster care - when I got a phone call out of the blue from Josh Aronson. When he described his production on the conflict in the deaf world, I had to admit I was intrigued and that I knew very little about this centuries old battle.
As a parent, I was not surprised to meet parents of deaf children who would move heaven and earth to enable their children to hear. I was, however, shocked to meet people who loved being deaf, celebrated when they had deaf children, and wouldn't choose to be hearing even if they could. I was even more surprised by how compelling and persuasive their arguments were. As I learned more about sign language and deaf culture, I began to recognize what a threat the cochlear implant posed to an entire way of life. I also began to realize what Josh already knew - there was a story here that was waiting to be told. I was thrilled to join forces with Josh as we set out to tell the story of the communication wars of the deaf.
We began by profiling several deaf subjects who were bright, sympathetic, and engaging, but they were by and large content with the communication choices they had made many years ago. Josh and I realized we needed to capture the struggle and turmoil that many deaf individuals as well as parents face as they confront painful identity choices. When we found the Artinian family, we were amazed that so many of the tough choices facing the deaf community could be found in one close-knit family. Their story injected more tension, conflict, and drama into the film than we possibly could have imagined. We watched and filmed as two families headed by two brothers were torn apart by the question of whether to give their deaf children cochlear implants. As the editing process progressed, we began eliminating other stories one by one, because the Artinian family drama seemed to address all of the questions facing the other subjects in a more immediate and compelling way. Eventually, we were left with just the Artinian family's story, a perfect microcosm for the broader conflict in the deaf community.
The documentaries I appreciate the most are the ones that take viewers inside a world they have never seen or that is difficult to penetrate. I hope that the public shares my fascination with discovering the embattled world of the deaf. Unfortunately, documentaries often get a bad rap. They are perceived as dry, informative, or didactic. But, I believe documentaries can have every bit as much drama and pathos as the best fiction features. With SOUND AND FURY, Josh and I found ourselves constantly repeating a common documentary filmmaker's mantra - "you can't make this stuff up." The Artinian family story evolved in ways that astonished us and could never have been predicted, much less scripted. The realism, intimacy, candor, and raw emotion that we were fortunate enough to capture is a phenomena unique to non-fiction filmmaking.
In addition to revealing a world that is virtually unknown and inaccessible to most hearing people, the Artinian family battle raises some powerful universal questions about personal limitations, generational conflict, the search for personal identity, the meaning of culture, and the definition of community.
EARLY PRESS
REVIEWS
"SOUND
AND FURY is powerful, insightful, important and emotionally wrenching!"
Anita Gates, The New York Times
"The
kind of intensely human drama that the best of Sundance documentaries often
provide. Intimately focused as
well as fair to all sides, this is a powerful examination of a question that
is nowhere as simple as it may seem at first!"
Kenneth Turan,
Los Angeles Times
"A
sensation at Sundance...a very powerful documentary...it will be seen by all
of us in the fall!"
Diane Sawyer, Good Morning America
"Fascinating...SOUND
AND FURY is remarkably effective at getting up-close and personal with its
subjects...serious issues receive intelligent consideration in a technically
polished package!"
Joe Leydon, Variety
"An
extremely interesting film that held me from beginning to end!"
John Powers, Vogue
"A
fascinating film...makes for interactive, participatory film-going!"
John Anderson, Newsday
"In
a festival [Sundance] notable for great documentaries, SOUND AND FURY was
among the best!"
Thelma Adams, New
York Post
"SOUND
AND FURY is intellectually provocative and emotionally involving without
being exploitative. What is
most remarkable is the rapport the filmmakers achieved with their
subjects!"
Amy Taubin, Village
Voice
"A
staggering new documentary...the very best film I saw at Sundance
2000...balances emotionalism and sociological detail as deftly as recent
acclaimed doc 'Hoop Dreams'. Watching
'Sound And Fury' is an unforgettable experience...a remarkable piece of
work!"
Michael
O'Rorke, Hollywood Stock Exchange
"SOUND
AND FURY triumphs as a moral debate because it's so keen on exploring every
possible angle of the Artinian's deeply existential dilemma.
The film is refreshingly bias free...it confounds expectations and
raises fascinating new questions about cultural identity in general - and
not merely among the deaf!"
Andy Bailey, IndieWIRE
"This
one family, filled with intelligent, passionate personalities, enlivens
every aspect of the issue!"
Rachel Rosen, Film Comment
"A
poignant film...we don't get so many chances to walk straight into the heart
of a powerful dilemma that touches us with the radiance of human
possibility!"
Michele
Landsberg, Toronto Star
"Easily
one of the two best films at this year's [Sundance] festival!"
Sean Means, The
Salt Lake Tribune
"This
straightforward, absorbing doc goes inside an extended family in America
where an unusual battle is taking place!"
John Doyle, Broadcast
Week
"One
of the most intense dramas of the [Sundance] festival...'Sound And Fury' is
gripping, not only because of its fascinating subject, but it's also proof
that conflict lies at the core of any dramatic story, whether fiction or
otherwise!"
Patricia
Thomson, IndieWIRE
"Powerful
new film...shows all sides of the deaf experience!"
Thomas White, Release
Print
"With
a highly appropriate verite style, this exploration offers an informative
and dramatic insight into the politics, culture, and lives of a universe
which few in the hearing world understand!"
Geoffry Gilmore, Sundance Film Festival 2000
"We
award this film [a Golden Spire] for its unique ability to tell a compelling
and captivating story that transcends its immediate subject matter to cover
profound and universal questions about the nature of family, community, and
culture!"
Jury, Golden Gate Awards, San Francisco International Film Festival
"Not
to be missed...the film thoughtfully captures the anguished, opposing views
of the grandparents and parents as well as the vibrant children whose
futures are of concern to everyone!"
The Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art, New Directors/New Films Festival
"Intensely
emotional...this riveting and insightful documentary is sparking heated
debate in communities across the U.S.!"
Ramsay Pennypacker, Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema