A few years ago, I watched the documentary below about the crossroads of sign language and Slam Poetry. It was a beautiful and moving documentary that I highly recommend everyone watch.
If you’re not familiar with Slam Poetry, it’s somewhere between a poetry reading and theater. Poetry meant to be performed, almost acted. Needless to say, it’s an audio experience.
The movie, which I watched on PBS’ Independent Lens, made me much more aware of the lives of deaf people and their struggles in a “hearing” world. For example, the focus of the documentary, Israeli-New Yorker teen Aneta Brodski, laments the fact that there is no positive word for deaf, rather only words and phrases that denote what they cannot do, like “hearing impaired.”
I’ve thought a lot about this documentary over the last few years, and it was brought back to me again as soon as I saw this music video by Ed Sheeran. Rather than making a video with just subtitles, he made one that shows the emotion and the excitement of the song using a sign language actor.
The song, You Need Me, I Don’t Need You was a single from his album + and performed well in Britain.
Ed Sheeran (Photo credit: Christie Goodwin)