Revolution on screen: Sign on Screen Festival celebrates Deaf-led cinema

Posted on 21 May, 2026

A groundbreaking new festival is bringing Deaf-led cinema to the silver screen.

Launching at the National Film and Sound Archive this weekend, the Sign on Screen Festival aims to celebrate Deaf perspectives, boost representation and help hearing audiences rethink deeply ingrained myths.

The completely free and fully accessible festival is spearheaded by Dr Gemma King, a DECRA Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University (ANU), joined by full-time PhD candidates and acclaimed Deaf filmmakers Sofya Gollan and Sam Martin. Together, they have united major cultural forces, including the ANU, Deaf Connect and the National Film and Sound Archive, for the Festival.

Gemma says for most of film history, the screen has framed deafness as tragedy, silence as emptiness and deaf characters as figures to be pitied or fixed. That’s now changing rapidly: some recent examples include Alaqua Davis in the Marvel series Echo and Millicent Simmonds in A Quiet Place.

“We are currently in this revolution where more Deaf-led filmmaking is happening than ever before,” Gemma says.

“We are starting to see different ways of thinking about deafness and the portrayal of sign language as an asset.

“We’re also mindful of not trading one stereotype for another. There’s been a welcome wave of deaf superheroes in films like Eternals and series such as Hawkeye, which is great for visibility, especially for young people with deafness seeing themselves on screen, but we also need stories where deaf characters don’t have to be exceptional or superhuman to be accepted. Normalising deafness means showing it as a thread in the rich fabric of a life, rather than a tragic drama or a superpower.”

The significance of the festival isn’t lost on filmmaker Sofya Gollan, who says she has spent her career navigating an industry that has historically told stories about Deaf people, rather than with or by them.

“So much of my work has involved finding the gaps where Deaf perspectives could enter, often in spite of prevailing assumptions about what Deaf people must be like, instead of who they actually are; individual and complex people where deafness is one aspect of them,” she says.

“Festivals like this one matter because they shift that centre of gravity. They make visible what has always been there: a rich, generative tradition of Deaf and Hard of Hearing screen artists whose work doesn’t just represent Deaf experience but genuinely expands what cinema can be. It also offers reassurance to those who want to work in the industry that they are not alone.”

The Festival’s Opening night will include “Australian Deaf-led Shorts” while the Sunday afternoon program includes two screenings (Deaf President Now!, a documentary about Deaf Pride activism and Imagined Touch, a work about deafblindness), followed by a “Margaret and David” style new film review show by Deaf artists and film buffs Irene Holub and Luke King. Every film, workshop and panel discussion is fully accessible with Auslan-English interpreting, English SDH captions and hearing loop capability. For a pre or post-film treat, there will also be coffee and pastries on offer in the courtyard from Dom’s Deli and Bar.

Gemma says the festival is also a rare opportunity for those working in the Australian screen industry to network and build bridges with Deaf and Hard of Hearing creatives, while dispelling some of the myths surrounding their practices and approaches.

“Through this research project, I’ve learned how deeply hearing fantasies and myths about sign language and deafness are embedded in the kinds of stories that make it to commercial film and television, most of which are not written or directed by people with lived experience of deafness or fluency in sign,” Gemma says.

“As a hearing researcher writing about these histories, it is immensely rewarding to be able to support Deaf-led creative work and celebrate Deaf and Hard of Hearing filmmakers who are changing the ways sign languages and deafness are portrayed on screen.”

Feature image: Dr Gemma King and filmmaker Sofya Gollan. Credit: Neha Attre.