Alan in Belfast: Deaf – prejudice, inclusion, isolation and motherhood (Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 12 September)

You’ll encounter babies at every turn in Queen’s Film Theatre at the moment. And it’s not just the popular Baby Pictures screenings which turn the café/bar into a pram park. Nor confined to last week’s Young Mothers.

Deaf is written and directed by Eva Libertad, with her sister Miriam Garlo playing Ángela, a potter who is deaf. Her husband Héctor (Álvaro Cervantes) is hearing. They’re having a baby. Ángela’s world is turned upside down with anxiety as she considers that her whole sense of identity might be about to be permanently changed and displaced.

We sense that she’s weighing up how a hearing child might interact more with her husband than with her. All this on top of the normal uncertainty of pregnancy and impending motherhood.

Significant portions of the film’s dialogue are ‘spoken’ in Spanish sign language (and subtitled). Significant moments are marked with silent gestures.

Time passes and her bump grows. Layers of isolation are explored – “I’m outside of everything” – and there’s something very universal about what the Guardian’s Leslie Felperin describes as the “kinship” or “horizontal identifies” that groups of people can feel.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall watching how different audiences reflect on the film as they come out of screenings. I hope that deaf audiences see themselves authentically portrayed. (The filmmakers stress in interviews that everyone’s experience of life is unique.) I wonder whether children of deaf parents may also recognise themselves when Ángela spots the hearing son of a deaf friend sitting on the edge of a group, not joining in the signed conversations and games with the deaf children.

The health service doesn’t put her needs first, with a doctor having to be reminded that he should look at Ángela when he’s speaking to her, rather than directing his gaze and his comments to Héctor. And her traumatic experience of childbirth with a cacophony of health professionals screaming at her in the delivery suite while her signing husband, her lifeline to understand the overwhelming babble around her, is kept out of sight. Hearing aids are a nuisance, oppressive to use, but also a vital link to a majority hearing world that doesn’t go out of its way to adapt or provide reasonable adjustments.

The babies and children playing little Ona are all very cute. Watch out for the beautiful ceiling mobile. The final scene hints at a resolution to some of Ángela’s worries: it’s a tearful moment at the end of a twenty minute section of the film where we have all been immersed in Ángela’s soundscape.

Garlo and Cervantes deliver engaging performances as their characters try to navigate the journey through pregnancy into parenthood. Deaf is a powerful film that ponders prejudice, inclusion, isolation and motherhood. It’s being screened at Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 12 September. Along with Young Mothers, Deaf could be one of my films of the year.