It all began as a short film in 2021, co-directed with Nuria Muñoz and also titled Deaf (Sorda). It starred Spanish filmmaker Eva Libertad’s sister, Miriam Garlo, as a young deaf woman navigating the complexities of motherhood alongside her hearing partner. The short was a festival hit, screening at over 150 festivals worldwide, collecting 54 awards and earning a Goya nomination, a very impressive feat for a low-budget short film.
What started as a claustrophobic exploration of fear and identity, borne out of the soft, unspoken horrors of a deaf woman in a hearing world, has blossomed into something far richer and more expansive.
Now Libertad returns with a feature-length extension of the same story, one that holds the emotional precision of the short while expanding its thematic scope. Miriam is back in her role as Ángela, a character whose journey into motherhood becomes a lens for examining the tensions between the deaf and hearing worlds. By adding the complex internal dilemma of a future deaf mother coming to the realisation that her unborn child might not share the same reality she does, the film becomes a quiet triumph, blending moments of tenderness, frustration and resilience with rare authenticity.
At the Berlinale, Deaf (2025) sparked the kind of buzz that lingers long after the credits roll, triggering an inevitable yet very well-known festival question — the one critics and cinephiles ask when a film feels too extraordinary to be denied its place among the headliners: “Why isn’t this film in competition?” It’s a question that speaks volumes about the film’s quiet power; a power rooted not in sweeping melodrama or flashy storytelling, but in the quiet tension of a mother’s gaze, the unspoken weight of a partner’s frustration and the fragile beauty of a world seen through Ángela’s eyes. This film finds its strength in the spaces between words, in the moments where silence speaks louder than dialogue and in the raw, unvarnished truths of a life lived at the margins.
Comparisons to CODA (Sian Heder, 2021) were equally unavoidable, though Libertad’s work resists the feel-good simplicity of its Oscar-winning counterpart. Where CODA often leaned into sentimentality and a certain condescending tone, Sorda embraces contradiction, refusing to sanitise the messy, often painful realities of its characters’ lives. It’s a film that doesn’t just ask to be seen but demands to be felt.
Shortly before Deaf claimed the Audience Award in the Panorama section, we sat down with Eva Libertad to discuss the film’s unique sensibility, its emotional power, and the delicate art of bridging worlds — both on and off the screen.
What inspired you to expand your short into a feature-length film, and how did the narrative evolve during this transition?
The short film developed around the protagonist’s fears triggered by becoming a mother in a world made by and for hearing people. But in the feature film, that idea becomes real, the couple has a baby and problems arise, which has allowed us to explore more deeply the experience of being a deaf mother in a society that turns its back on disabilities, and to delve into the complexity of the bond between the hearing world and the deaf world.
Given that your sister, Miriam Garlo, who plays Ángela in both short and feature films, has personally faced challenges as a deaf person considering motherhood, how did her experiences influence the storytelling and character development?
My sister has been involved in the project from the beginning. In fact, the short film on which the feature film Deaf is inspired was born from the moment when my sister was considering becoming a mother. At that time she shared her fears as a deaf woman with me, and I realised that I had never thought about it before: the concerns of a deaf woman who wants to be a mother in a hearing world. At that moment, I figured out that, in addition to the insecurities we have as women, there are others related to deafness that I hadn’t considered before. So I asked her to put those fears in writing and a few days later she sent me a list of them, which made a big impression on me. From that list, came the short film Deaf, which ended up becoming this feature film.
But I think it’s important to highlight that this is a fictional film and that it’s not based on my sister’s life. In fact, I interviewed deaf mothers to know what their worries and fears were during their pregnancies. If they shared them with their partners, how motherhood changed their relationship with their partner or with their parents, what were the difficulties in communicating with the baby… They also told me their experiences during the labour that, in some cases, were way harder than what can be seen in the film.
Afterwards, with all that material, I chose what I thought would work best in Ángela’s and Héctor’s story. In the end, it has a real background taken from these interviews, but it’s completely fictional at the same time.
You have set up a brilliant ensemble of actors. What was the casting process like, particularly in selecting actors for roles that bridge the deaf and hearing worlds?
In the case of Álvaro Cervantes, who plays Héctor, Ángela’s hearing partner, he joined the project very early on. A year before shooting began, we got Miriam and Álvaro together and spent an afternoon improvising and doing some scenes to test the connection and chemistry between them. The meeting was wonderful and Álvaro had a whole year to learn sign language. We also did a lot of rehearsals in which we were creating all the parts of the relationship between Ángela and Héctor that are not seen in the film, but that were essential for the bond to work in the story.
For the deaf characters, we called deaf actors from all over Spain. It was a long casting, but little by little they appeared, and finally, the deaf cast was a mix of trained and non-trained actors.
Speaking of the dynamic between Ángela and Héctor, one of the film’s greatest feats is the use of language as a narrative tool. Deaf navigates the tensions between spoken language and sign language, both formally and thematically. How did you approach the film’s linguistic structure — not just in terms of accessibility, but as a storytelling device that shapes the audience’s perception of Ángela’s world?
From the beginning, my wish was that this film would be a meeting place for deaf and hearing audiences. For this reason, the whole film had to have both spoken and sign language subtitles. It was the only way that in the cinemas this encounter between the two audiences could take place.
At the narrative level, sign language belongs to Angela’s world, she uses it in her safe space: with Hector, with her group of friends.
However, when she leaves that place, with her parents or in the hearing world in general, Angela has to use her voice to communicate, and lip-reading to understand.
In this sense, there is a clear evolution throughout the film that was already in the script. In the beginning, when Ángela and Héctor are in their bubble of love and communication, where everything is fine, sign language is very present, Ángela does not use her voice and Héctor speaks very little and softly.
But when the baby arrives and the problems begin, little by little oral language takes over Ángela’s spaces. She is forced to use her voice more and more and Hector also speaks more and more, and louder and louder. To the point that Hector’s last sentence is a scream.
The film explores Ángela’s desire for motherhood while also confronting societal and familial expectations. Did you find that the intersection of gender and disability added layers of complexity to how her autonomy is perceived?
Of course, in addition to the inequalities she faces for being a woman in this patriarchal society, Angela has to face discrimination for having functional diversity in this enabling society. And I am afraid that the latter is even more invisible than the others.
Were there any particular struggles you wanted to highlight in her journey?
I have seen many times how Miriam enrolled in interpreting courses and when she said that she was deaf and if it was possible for the course to be adapted, she was kindly told that no, that the course was not for her. This no longer happens with sexual orientation, gender or skin colour, at least in artistic fields, which are supposed to be the most advanced in these matters. But it does happen with disability because we have no idea how to manage ourselves in the relationship and what resources to use, etc., so I definitely wanted to add that to the film.
I wanted to talk a bit about the sound too. Silence is often used in cinema as a dramatic or suspenseful tool, but in Deaf, silence (or the absence of spoken dialogue) is a natural state of being. How did you and your sound team think about subverting audience expectations around silence and sound design?
This was possibly the most difficult one to work with. During the writing of the script, in some of the labs in which I participated, they encouraged me to use sound to get the spectator closer to Ángela. They proposed to create a change in the sound in the scenes in which Ángela was going through emotionally difficult or intense moments so that the audience would hear like her. I called that “deaf sound.” For example, during the delivery, or when she’s surrounded by hearing people and doesn’t understand anything. And in that scene, or when that moment finished, we would go back to the “normal” sound, which I named “hearing sound”.
However, I had a problem with this because, as a spectator, I don’t like my feelings being directed, at least not in a very obvious way. I don’t like it when I realise that the director is telling me “Now, you have to get emotional, now you have to cry, etc”. I believe that as directors, we long for the audience to feel emotional, at least in a specific kind of cinema. Despite this, we must find a way of doing it while allowing the audience to experience their own journey. It’s something complicated and subtle, but also fascinating.
After much consideration, I finally decided not to use sound in that way, but for the film to have “hearing sound” all the time, and only when Angela breaks down, move on to her sonic point of view. It is as if we were “with her” at the beginning and only when she breaks down do we get “inside her.”
There’s been progress in the representation of deaf characters in film, but many narratives still centre on overcoming disability or assimilation into the hearing world. Did you consciously try to challenge or reject certain cinematic tropes about deafness?
With this film, I didn’t want to make a thesis on deafness. I have never thought of Ángela as a representative of the deaf community.
There are many types of deafness, depending on the degree of hearing loss, the age at which it appears, and the causes. And there are also many ways of being deaf; within the group of deaf people, there are the same differences as there can be among the group of hearing people. But all deaf people have one thing in common: they encounter communication barriers in their daily lives, to a greater or lesser extent.
When I think of Ángela, I see a woman who is going through motherhood, who lives in a relationship in which problems arise, with a complicated relationship with her parents, who wants her daughter to know and love her. And who, on top of all this, is deaf. Ángela is ready for the world, but the world is not ready for her.
Building on that, Ángela’s experience as a deaf woman feels deeply personal and visually distinct. How did you approach the film’s narrative and aesthetic choices to reflect her perspective, particularly in ways that might challenge or expand how deafness is often portrayed on screen?
In terms of narrative and aesthetic choices, we faced some aspects related to the fact that our protagonist was deaf, which affected the style of the film. For example: all deaf people have a visual perception of the world, which means that they capture all the information through their sight. I was researching this topic, and I thought of finding deaf artists and painters to see how their representation of the world was. It was very enlightening regarding the use of colour and the symbolism with hands, eyes and ears.
So, I shared this document with my DOP, Gina Ferrer, and we were thinking about how we were going to reflect this in the film. We decided not to use filters and to let the colour be as similar as possible to reality. Also, we decided not to lose depth of field, since Ángela perceives the world through her eyes.
Another challenge we came across was how the fact that the characters communicated through sign language affected the type of shot. Since the characters used their hands and arms to express themselves, we had to work with medium or medium close-up shots in order not to lose them. There are very few short shots in the film because even when the characters weren’t signing, we decided to maintain continuity, for all the shots in the film to be coherent.
Wellington Almeida is a programmer, a film writer and a devoted cat lover.