“First Day”
The story of a boy’s struggle shoots straight into the hearts of viewers with close-up camera angles, a fast-paced story line and excellent casting. “First Day” opens with flashbacks of young Walter, who is deaf, and his father at play in the woods just before his father departs for military service. Acutely feeling his father’s absence, Walter’s misfortunes continue when he arrives late to his first day of school.
While lasting a mere eight minutes, the short film written and directed by Jacob Shelton packs in an hour’s worth of plot using quick scene changes and subtle foreshadowing to create the twists and turns that drive the main storyline. The characters are also especially strong for a short film. The mother’s demeanor and actions make her a sympathetic figure, while Walter’s innocence creates a believable character. However, it is Walter’s grade school teacher who steals the show. From her loose-fitting floral top to the way she seems to waddle down the hall, she is the epitome of the grumpy teacher almost everyone encountered at some point during school. The film’s ending stirs viewers’ emotions with a not-so-subtle shot at school systems that try to treat every student the same. Instead of feeling anger toward the school and the teacher, you may pity their naivete.
“First Day” exposes still-rampant prejudices toward people with disabilities in an intriguing fashion that leaves viewers wanting more than just eight minutes. Try this short for a powerful lead-in to your next dramatic movie night among friends.
“First Day” (2005) is available on DVD for $12.00 at www.amazon. com.
Coming Soon?
The 2007 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary was awarded to “Hear and Now.” Directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky, the film follows Brodsky’s parents, Paul and Sally Taylor, as they undergo cochlear implant surgery at age 65. Online reviewer Indiewire’s Susan Gerhard writes that the movie is laced with comedic ironies.
Sally is first seen in home-movie footage singing a lullaby to her baby in a high chair. Then the scene darts to Sally as a white-haired woman of 65, enjoying heavy metal music in her car radio at decibel levels one would describe as “deafening” if the driver weren’t already deaf. Sally feels the music. Like her husband Paul, she was trained to speak and “hear” through touch: feeling the vibrations of sounds on a cheek, a speaker or piano. All that changes when the couple receives their cochlear implants. Says Gerhard in her review, “Sound is novelty to the couple, who, after the medical agonies and emotional transitions, find they have better ways to interact with the hearing world. We are charmed to see this engaging elderly couple return to form, fully alert to life’s possibilities and happy to decline a few.” Peter Debruge of Variety writes that “Hear and Now” is gut-wrenching: “Taylor Brodsky’s film echoes her parents’ heartbreak, constantly shifting away from the medical advice ... to capture their frustration. Like the wrenching personal accounts of cancer survivors, ‘Hear and Now’ unlocks the psychological side of their experience, with raw emotion smoothing over the intimate picture’s less cinematic qualities.”
Paul and Sally Taylor are retired faculty from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), a college of the Rochester Institute of Technology. On June 14, NTID hosted a special screening of “Hear and Now” to raise scholarship funds for film and animation students. “Hear and Now” has not yet been released on DVD.
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