From our 2025 Schools at Festival program: Deaf President Now!—For eight days in March 1988, students of Washington D.C.’s Gallaudet University protested the appointment of a hearing president. Demanding truly representative leadership, the students broke the cycle of pity and condescension that defined their experience at the world’s first university for deaf and hard of hearing students. Actor Nyle DiMarco, a Gallaudet graduate, makes his directorial debut with this documentary that memorializes a watershed moment not only in American disability rights activism but also in the history of US student movements. Key players in the protest lead the audience through the events of those heady days and relate how they overcame sexism, ableism, and paternalism to ensure an equitable future for the generations of Gallaudet students that followed. Narrated through American Sign Language and voiceovers, Deaf President Now! relates the involving story of an under-reported triumph.
Deaf President Now! (2025)
The story dawns at Gallaudet University in Washington DC, the only truly Deaf university in the world, 1988, with a group of four intensely spirited, passionate young people.