The order of languages is very important at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, held in the Basque coastal town since 1953. All communications, such as the annoucements projected on screen or the introductions to screenings, are in three languages and always in this order: Basque, Spanish, English. Audience from abroad with tickets or passes must pay close attention to the program, because not all screenings (always in original version) have subtitles in three languages: it may happen that those who only understand English have the misfortune of booking a seat for a screening with subtitles in Basque and Spanish, or even that a Spaniard may have difficulty with films with subtitles in English and Basque! It is very important to check all the information about the films before deciding what to see and when; in addition to the subtitles, the language in which the film is spoken is also indicated. It may happen that a sign language is also listed among the languages of the film in the program, specifying which one: the two on the agenda this year were English and Spanish sign language.
The Son and the Sea, the debut feature by director Stroma Cairns selected for the New Directors competition, the sign language listed in the program is English, but it would have been more accurate to list it as British, as the story takes place almost entirely in Scotland. Jonah is a young man in the midst of an existential crisis who doesn’t know what to do with his life. Together with his friend Lee, he decides to leave London and spend some time in a village on the Northeast coast of Scotland, settling into the vacant house of his great-aunt who has moved into a nursing home due to a degenerative disease; in fact, when he goes to visit her, she no longer recognizes him. As soon as they arrive, Jonah and Lee meet two deaf twins; they immediately strike up a sincere friendship with one, while the other is more bad-tempered and gets into trouble.
The director came up with a story with many personal implications: the lead actor is her brother, she herself is hard of hearing, and she shot the film in the region where her maternal family comes from. She wanted to portray human relationships between fragile and lost young men, in which personal sensitivity was a stimulus for communication without barriers and prejudices, because here no one feels superior to others and this is also why the protagonists manage to build an intense relationship even though they speak different languages. Perhaps it is not possible to give complete meaning to one’s life, but spontaneous friendship and altruism are a possible cure for the invisible pains of the soul.
The Made in Spain program, which every year brings the best of Spanish cinema from the past year to San Sebastián, has selected a film that had already won the Panorama Audience Award at the 75th Berlinale: Sorda (Deaf) by Eva Libertad, whose title explains right away the condition of the protagonist Ángela. Her partner Héctor has learnt sign language just for her and together they await the birth of a somewhat unexpected child. As Ángela’s deafness could be genetic, there is a risk that the unborn child will also be deaf; but this can only be confirmed after the birth.
This double possibility creates a few cracks in a solid couple: just when waiting for the diagnosis, the social split that often divides hearing and deaf people, who basically express themselves in two different languages, becomes more clear. What will the child’s language be? The confusion one feels when observing a dinner scene with amiably and lively chats only with signs (but the viewers are aided by subtitles) mirrors what Ángela feels in the scenes in which other people speak out loud without allowing her to read their lips and she is partially excluded. The new mother’s fear is that her own child could exclude her in the future, which is why she observes the children of her friends very carefully. The performance of the main protagonist Miriam Garlo (who lost most of her hearing at the age of 7, learned sign language at the age of 30, and is the sister of the director) is full of love and fear and reveals wonderfully how being able to communicate or not can be equivalent to the difference between existing and disappearing.
