Award-winning documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (“Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” 2023 Sundance Film Festival; “He Named Me Malala” 2015; “An Inconvenient Truth” 2006) teams up with Gallaudet University alumnus, model, actor, and Deaf activist Nyle DiMarco (America’s Next Top Model) to co-direct a wonderfully compelling re-look at eight days in 1988 when the students at world’s only Deaf university locked down their Washington DC campus demanding the appointment of a deaf university president.
The University’s Board is led by Jane Spilman, a strong president who clearly thinks she knows best for the students and the Deaf community. The Board ignites the protest by selecting a questionably qualified non-deaf candidate over two qualified deaf candidates. Spilman approaches her defense of the decision so resolute and steely-eyed, she’d make Clint Eastwood blink first in a stare-off.
The film chronicles the four main student leaders, each with distinct personal skills and representing very different factions of the students. The filmmakers employ an engaging method of turning the sound on and off at critical moments, as they portray the students’ surprising tactical moves during the week of negotiations and protest with tension and twists and turns rivaling an NFL play-off game two minute drill.
The end of the premiere was deservedly greeted with an arousing and incomparable mosh pit of emphatically waved hands. The directing duo successfully capture the magic of students’ unity by deeply personalizing the evolution of the historic protest and lay perhaps a blue-print of activism for the future by illustrating that no one voice or set of hands will be as effective as strategic partnerships and unity of a community.
On the KPCW sun rating system, "Deaf President Now!" receives five out of five suns.
