All The Young Dudes

ALERT: YOUTUBE FLIK: COMING OUT

Alison just alerted me to a fantastic short flik on Youtube, called COMING OUT.

COMING OUT is about a  son comes to his mother with a compelling secret. Will she understand? It is a quirky comedy written by Charlie Swinbourne and directed by Louis Neethling (who also directed BBC2’s ‘Switch’). The film was made for the London Deaf Film Festival and premiered in January 2007. It stars David Hay, Debbie Norman and Ilan Dwek.

Without giving away the storyline [and spoiling your viewing pleasure], it uses the coming out process, that Gays and Lesbians  only know too well, and posits it as a coming out as a Deaf Person. It’s fucking fantastic, and if you remember your first forays into dirty videos and dirty magazines, you are in for a treat here. The parallels between being Deaf and being Gay/ Lesbian are so similar. The ending took me by surprise and is a stark reminder of how well we don’t know a person, and how our worse fears can come true. That the people we know and love, is not the person we thought they were.

There are some issues I have with the film, a concern that I have been aware of for some time.
In exploring Deafness, it unfortunately reinforces the male view of the world:
Man = Active, Initiator, Makes Things Happens and Woman = Passive, Wallflower.
Not only that, it also a white male [people] world.

This particular world view, informs much of the films that are produced. Which goes along way to explaining why Deafies, Gays/ Lesbians, Blacks, different ethnicities, et al, are not given enduring treatments, and tend to be issue or flavour of the month. Even within other cultures, the male view is the dominant one.

But for the subject explored, the film still deserves a “Fuck! Go and watch it! COMING OUT”

See also:

Coming Out
Four Deaf Yorkshiremen, A Trailer
BBC Access 2.0: Interview with Charlie Swinbourne

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