Hacker Cinema
Sound and Fury
2000 · Film · documentary · 80 min
Directed by Josh Aronson
A documentary film released in 2000 about two American families with young deaf children and their conflict over whether or not to give their children cochlear implants, surgically implanted devices that may improve their ability to hear but may threaten their deaf identity.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
Thanks for the Sound and Fury recommendation. I watched it today and had an interesting discussion with my housemates.
I highly recommend watching the short followup, "Sound and Fury: 6 years later": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb-zKebd5us
Are you saying the people who don't believe in putting cochlear implants in to their kids must be liberals? If so, why?
The cochlear implant issue itself is a rather complex and interesting one. Most hearing people are immediately outraged when they learn that some deaf people want to prevent their children from hearing, but I think this is a knee-jerk reaction that stems mostly from ignorance of Deaf culture[1] and its value in the Deaf community.
There's a great documentary called Sound and Fury[2] that explores this issue by interviewing deaf and hearing families as they struggled to decide whether to have implant surgery performed on their children. I strongly encourage everyone to watch this documentary before making up their minds on this issue.
Also, talking to some Deaf people, getting some exposure to and knowledge of Deaf culture, learning about the long and ugly history of discrimination and paternalistic interventions by hearing people against deaf people, and the struggle of deaf people for self-determination would probably be a good idea too.
With this knowledge I think it becomes difficult to dismiss the issue as ridiculous or say that there's any easy, obvious answer.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_and_Fury_%28film%29
In a similar vein, there was a documentary called "Sound and Fury" on the controversy of cochlear implants in the deaf community: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/soundandfury/index.html