‘Deaf President Now’ Directors on the Timeliness of the Student Protests and Why Collective Action Can Work

In 1988, a civil rights movement led to significant change. However, it’s not discussed or even taught — until now.

AppleTV+’s “Deaf President Now!” recalls how, in 1988, students at Gallaudet University protested for one week until they finally elected the first deaf president to run the university after 125 years of never having a deaf president.

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Nyle DiMarco, the film’s co-director and co-producer, spoke through an interpreter and said, “Throughout history, you can see that deaf and disabled stories really have been left out of the textbooks. There are so many moments throughout our history that you can see deaf and disabled people have really shaped world history overall.” He went on to say, “I am actually from a fourth-generation deaf family. So I have two brothers, two parents, grandparents, and even my great-grandparents are all deaf. And they passed not just this story down, but so many others really hand to hand like an oral history, because it is often left out of mainstream storytelling.”

DiMarco learned very quickly about other civil rights movement, but not this. It was something he found telling. “I realized I was different, where my people didn’t have equal footing in society and weren’t seen as equal.”

And so he waited 35 years for this story to be told.

Co-director and co-producer Davis Guggenheim, whose credits include “He Named Me Malala” and “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” was a history major but didn’t know anything about the movement. That is, until DiMarco brought it to him. “It’s one of these cases where four young people in a matter of days become leaders. They don’t get along. They figure it out, and they change the way America looks at the world. It’s quite an extraordinary story and a real gift.”

DiMarco was a champion of this, and Guggenheim was more than happy to jump on board.

Before DiMarco even brought it to Guggenheim, the idea was that it would be a scripted project. It was Guggenheim who suggested this story needed to be a documentary.

DiMarco explained he had a few objectives. “In making this film, I wanted it to be something that deaf people would go and see and say, ‘That’s our movie.’ And that meant so much to me. But also it meant that we had to be true to the theme of ‘Deaf President Now!,’ which is allowing deaf people to lead.”

That was when Guggenheim invited DiMarco to co-direct. But it didn’t end there. Deaf people across every artisan and crew department were brought in to make this story as authentic to real life as possible.

It took experimenting with piecing the story together. The biggest being was helping hearing people understand deaf people’s relationship to sound. DiMarco explained, “We may not hear the sound that noise makes. There are visual indicators, as you’ve seen in the film, and that’s how we experienced sound. So with those visualizations and those moments, we really wanted to play with designing a deaf POV and we weren’t sure that it would work. But in our collaboration, we experimented and tried just about everything and it was a lot of fun, and we were able to make some great things happen.”

Guggenheim added that during meetings, “I would be sitting there feeling totally uncomfortable conversations across the room because you, as long as you could see someone, you could understand them. And I couldn’t understand anything. And I was like, I need the audience to feel what I feel.” That was when they decided to experiment with the sonic approach and pull sound completely. “What if you yanked the viewer into the deaf experience and yanked them back into the hearing experience? And what if when you pass through the gates of Gallaudet, you go from a very noisy room into this world that’s very, very different?”

It was DiMarco’s idea to interview the four subjects Bridgetta Bourne-Firl, Jerry Covell, Greg Hlibok and Tim Rarus, and how they would be the best way to get to the heart of the story. But also getting them separately to ensure the truth of what happened really came out. “It’s almost like everyone knows when someone knows the story and they’re telling it to you, they skip past things. But if they’re telling someone who’s never heard it before. But I would do the interviews, but Nyle would be tapping my shoulder, going, ‘Wait a minute, he’s full of shit. He’s lying to tell the story about what they said.’”

In one scene, former chair of the board of trustees Jane Spilman is shown. She is reported to have said, “Deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world.”

DiMarco explained how, for over 35 years, there had never been any solid evidence that this had happened. He explained, “When we reached out to Gallaudet, we were very blessed to get over 40 hours of archival footage. And after screening through every single pixel of it, we couldn’t find it. But when we showed the initial cut to the four student leaders, their first response was, even though we don’t have evidence of it, everything else points to it; her facial expressions, the way that she’s willing to talk about things.”

He went on to say, “Four of those student leaders said they had never seen the clips that we showed them. It had been 35 years. And, of course, you look back and maybe glamorize things, but they were like, ‘No, she really in fact, was that bad.’”

As for the film’s release and how audiences can finally learn about “Deaf President Now!,” DiMarco wrapped by saying the film felt timely. “I think, considering the political landscape that we’re living in and sort of the mess that we’re seeing being played out in our streets with protests and protests and protests for change. But I think people have really sort of forgotten how to protest. And I think I would want this movie to be a reminder that collective action can, in fact, work.”

Watch the video above.

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