Deaf President Now!
Description
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. —Bedatri Choudhury
This film will be screened with Open Captions and have an American Sign Language Interpreter present.
Biographies
Queens, NY, native Nyle DiMarco is a model, actor, activist, and filmmaker. He was the first deaf contestant on America’s Top Model, winning the competition. He also won the competition on Dancing with the Stars. For those shows as well as his acting roles on the series This Close and Station 19, he received the 2019 SAG-AFTRA Harold Russell Award. He executive produced the series Deaf U (2020) and the short Audible (2021). Deaf President Now! marks his directing debut.
Prolific director and producer Davis Guggenheim won a Best Documentary Feature Academy Award® for An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Among his other films are The First Year (2001), winner of a Peabody Award and a San Francisco International Film Festival Certificate of Merit; Gracie (2007); It Might Get Loud (2008); Waiting for “Superman” (Festival 2009), winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Documentary Audience Award; From the Sky Down (2011); He Named Me Malala (2015); and Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (Festival 2023).
