Night Sky

A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.

Using the soundtracks of disaster movies as material, A Disaster is an almost entirely imageless film; comprised of sound and text, it is centered on the physical comprehension of subsonic frequencies, tactile sound, and how experiences of sonic violence mirror the relentless ubiquity of ableism.

Ten year-old SETH wants to give up his toys, but his work-numbed mother LILY needs the spark of their playtime more than he does. Her insistence that he keep the toys leads to some unexpected places.

Horns blare and sound softly through thick LA air.