Eva Libertad spent months researching the script of Deaf, speaking to deaf women about pregnancy and parenthood for her drama about motherhood and identity. Almost immediately, the Spanish director knew the film needed a labour scene. “For all the women, giving birth had been a very traumatic event,” she says. She heard stories about women in labour not being informed of procedures, or having their hearing partners removed from the room, depriving them of an interpreter as well as support. “I left out some of the most difficult experiences.”
Her film gives us a frighteningly realistic birth scene. “Push, push hard,” shouts a doctor behind a face mask at the end of a long, drawn-out labour. The woman giving birth is Ángela, who is deaf and can’t read the doctor’s lips because of their face mask. Frightened and alone, Ángela lunges forward and rips off the mask. Her hearing partner is in the room. He’s meant to be interpreting, but was ordered from her bedside as things began to look like they might go wrong.
The common thread in all the stories Libertad heard was a feeling of desperation. “If birth is already difficult for hearing mothers, for deaf mothers it’s worse. There is the feeling: how will I know if something goes wrong? A fear that anything could happen.” Libertad is speaking over Zoom from her home in Molina de Segura, a town near Murcia. She used actual doctors and nurses in the scene to add realism. But no casting process was necessary to find an actor to play her lead character Ángela: Libertad hired her sister, Miriam Garlo, a well-known stage actor who is deaf.
Garlo was seven years old when she lost most of her hearing as the result of an allergic reaction. “I had a severe ear infection that led to high fevers,” she tells me. “I was given aspirin, which contains an acid that caused hearing damage – I lost 70% of my hearing.” This has now increased to 90%. “At the time, I didn’t experience it as something traumatic. I was just a child. My life changed completely, but I adapted out of survival.”
After studying fine art, Garlo trained as an actor. The sisters collaborated on a short film in 2021 also called Deaf: “At the time, Miriam was considering whether to become a mother,” Libertad says. “She shared with me her fears about becoming a deaf mother in a hearing world. And that’s where the short was born from.”
In the end, says Libertad, Garlo decided not to have children. “But when we wrapped on the short, I was left wanting more. What would happen if a baby came along?” So Libertad wrote a feature film about what happened next. Ángela is an artist and potter who lives in the Spanish countryside with her hearing partner Héctor (Álvaro Cervantes), and their dog and chickens. At the start of the film they are in a bubble of pregnancy bliss. The relationship looks as good as it gets; they love each other and their communication is solid. But parenthood changes their dynamic in ways that are difficult to navigate.
Becoming a mother, says Libertad, throws Ángela back into ableist society. “At the beginning you can see she has ownership over her own life and her own world. But with pregnancy, she once again has to face all these challenges she thought she’d overcome.” We see it most dramatically when she gives birth: the maternity care system is completely unprepared for a deaf woman.
The film also shows the day-to-day challenges. When her daughter starts nursery, Ángela finds it difficult to lipread during hurried conversations at pick-ups. A mum asks for her number for the class WhatsApp group. Ángela doesn’t understand. Embarrassed, she smiles and walks away.
Ángela’s daughter can hear, and in painful scenes Ángela begins to worry that she will be isolated from her baby and partner. “She sees her baby joining this world that she can never be 100% part of. A world that her partner is part of. So she has a fear of being left out.”
Not for the first time, Libertad tells me that Ángela does not represent all deaf mothers: “That would be impossible. There are as many ways of being a deaf mother as deaf mothers exist in the world.” Besides, hearing women have written to her to say they also identify with Ángela: “They talk about the same fear of not being a good mother, or of not fully bonding with their baby, or the fear of their baby preferring their partner over them.”
Two days later I speak to Garlo, Deaf’s star, at her home; she lives four doors down from her sister. There are two interpreters on the video call, one translating Spanish Sign Language into Spanish, the second Spanish to English. For our entire 60-minute conversation, Garlo leans into her camera, her focus sharp. In her job as an actor, she is used to concentrating on the invisible labour of reading lips.
“With directors who don’t know sign language, I’ve had to really work hard to listen with my eyes, to understand what they want, what they need in a scene,” she says. “I’m doing the work of interpreting. I’m having to make double the effort.” Which sounds exhausting, I say. “It is. It really drains my energy. Because if I don’t understand the instructions for a task, I’m not going to do it well.”
Deaf shows Garlo’s ability to inhabit a character completely. Her expressive face radiates happiness at the start of the film, then becomes increasingly anxious, taking on an edgy quality. It’s a stunning performance. But when audiences watch the movie, they often assume she is playing a version of herself. That may be because she is being directed by her sister, but ableism is a factor too, says Garlo. “Society still doesn’t understand that if you have an actor with a disability playing a character, the disability doesn’t make the character. But Ángela is not me. Her life decisions are not my life decisions.”
That must be incredibly frustrating. She pulls a face as if to say that’s not the half of it. “Yes, it is very frustrating. It’s a stigma that exists towards people with disabilities, and it does bother me, because it makes it seem that I’m unable to develop any kind of character who isn’t exactly the same as me.”
I read that Garlo did not learn to sign until she was 30. Is that true? She nods. Growing up, her parents didn’t really know much about sign language. They were a loving, caring family, but the focus was on education and academic attainment. “People thought of sign language just as an additional resource,” she says with a shrug. Is there a sense among hearing people that sign language is somehow a lesser language, I ask? “Yes, completely, 100%.”
But learning to sign changed Garlo’s life. “Until I was 30, I didn’t understand why life was so difficult. I had to make so much effort to lipread. But once I discovered sign language, it made everything so much easier.” Did she have much involvement in the deaf community before that? She shakes her head. “I had no contact with other deaf people until I was 30.”
After school, she focused all her energy on education, studying fine art in Madrid, then a master’s and a PhD. But something didn’t feel right. “It was a really sad time in my life. I fell into a major depression. I felt awful. I realised that my identity was kind of broken, like it had snapped in two. I realised that I needed sign language to connect with the deaf world. I sought it out. I found the deaf world, and I finally found people who had lives like mine. I did a sign language course when I was 30. Now I’m 40.”
What did it feel like, discovering her deaf identity? Garlo smiles. “I always say the first part of my life was like living in black and white. When I learned sign language, it was like the world suddenly flooded with colour. It was my salvation – finally being able to see all the colours in the world.”
