Here in America, I've seen firsthand the ways Deaf people are expected to achieve a great many things with their lives, such as becoming business leaders and attorneys.
I'm with the poet Gwendolyn Brooks when she said, "When you use the term 'minority' or 'minorities' in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else. Incidentally, I capitalize the word "Deaf" to refer to Deaf people who use sign language as their primary means of communication, as opposed to deaf people who choose not to sign. The Tribe focuses on Deaf characters. Those in hearing society, unfamiliar with what it means to be Deaf, have often proved to be the most significant barrier.
I once met a Deaf woman with a Ph. And I know of a Deaf man in Brazil whose most pressing goal was to become the manager of a McDonald's because that was the height of the glass ceiling for Deaf people in that country. So when I first learned about Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's The Tribe through the buzz it created at the Cannes Film Festival, I had a number of expectations when it came to seeing Deaf characters in movies.
Of course, I'm fully aware that when a Deaf character appears on screen, she is not me, but in the eyes of hearing viewers unfamiliar with Deaf culture or the sign language used in the story, she does reflect me in some ways. This is no different from the way gay people felt about seeing themselves portrayed so negatively in movies, usually committing suicide by the film's end, until LGBT people began to speak up and demand more positive representations in the movies.
Vito Russo's classic The Celluloid Closet is uniquely insightful on this topic, and so is the documentary it inspired, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. What happens in The Tribe? He tries to fit into a group of renegade young Deaf men led by Gera Alexander Dsiadevich by engaging in robberies and pimping.
