★★★★☆
Premiering at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival, Sorda (Deaf) won the Panorama Audience Award and has been widely praised for its authenticity and striking use of sound.
Ángela, a deaf woman, is expecting a child with her hearing partner, Héctor. The baby’s arrival unsettles the fragile equilibrium of their lives, forcing Ángela to confront the quiet terror of raising a hearing daughter in a world already designed without her in mind.
Eva Libertad approaches the story with restraint, letting us inhabit Ángela’s world rather than explaining it. With no traditional score, sound collapses into vibration, absence, texture.
Miriam Garlo, a deaf actress and artist, delivers a remarkable performance as Ángela, grounded in physical presence rather than vocal expression. Her face, posture, and hands carry the narrative’s emotional architecture. She conveys fear, tenderness, frustration, and longing with minimal theatricality, making the character feel wholly real.
Álvaro Cervantes as Héctor moves beside her as both companion and barrier. He loves her; this is never in doubt. Yet love cannot translate experience. He can step into rooms she cannot hear, speak to people she cannot reach, calm a child with a voice she will never possess. There are moments where he seems stranded, too, caught between worlds.
‘I am outside of everything.’
To be in a world of sound, without it.
A sensory exploration in the scoreless film, we hear all the noises of the world, prevalent and sounding through until we hear as she does, muffled drones and soft echoes of a seashell, sounds as vibrations, faces the only form of communication unless they can sign with their hands.
Subtly touch is shown as meaning to Ángela, the water on her skin, skin to skin of Hector and Ona, their child. Her work of pottery making, hands moulding wet clay into beauty, the loud machine of the spinning pottery wheel silent to her.
The sounds and feelings of sounds in nature, natural that Ángela is a part of, craving to be a part of, a natural person born a person who is missing sound in a world of sound. The natural world is safety, feelings, alone but the vibrations of the birds, that of the wind, drone of cicadas, the sun upon skin. When water is present it is amplified, the movement of it, the surge of waves, the coolness sleeking on skin, and safest of all, the crashing of the waterfall in her secluded lagoon.
Childbirth exposes the deepest isolation. We find Ángela outside in the grass, arms clutching the branches of her tree, asking to stay here for the fear of the unknowing nurses and doctors whose faces become deaf beneath surgical masks, her birth unable to be explained, communicated to her.
The baby arrives and is a ‘hearing person’, and another barrier is created for Ángela. Between a deaf mother and a hearing baby. The baby, naturally, responds to noise and the mother silent, speaks with her hands. Jealousy of Hector, he can communicate to their child, yet she once again is on the outside of another thing in her life.
The camera work takes us into the scene, makes us the third to the conversations, over the shoulder, side by side, a slight shake or wobble adding to the ‘I am there.’ Creating intimacy, realism, at times anxious and strung tension.
These feelings are extrapolated, brought to life and realism by the two lead actors who sweep you into the confines of their personal relationship. Coupled with the superb writing of the dialogue, a blended weave of accentuated storytelling has been produced.
Ángela is not simply a deaf woman struggling in a hearing world. She is a person perpetually positioned at the edge of belonging, reaching toward connection through touch, presence, and love. In that sense, the film speaks to a universal fear. Not of silence itself, but of being unheard.
Deaf runs from 4 – 8 March as part of Lotterywest Films and Perth Festival. Somerville Auditorium, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy, Godroo / Crawley WA 6009.
Tickets: https://www.perthfestival.com.au/program/season-2026/deaf
Website: https://www.perthfestival.com.au/program/season-2026/lotterywest-films
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/perthfest/ and https://www.instagram.com/lotterywest/
Watch the trailer here:
Film details:
Title: Deaf
Director: Eva Libertad
Cast: Miriam Garlo, Álvaro Cervantes, Elena Irureta, Joaquín Notario
Country of Origin: Spain
Duration: 99 mins
Rating: M
