| Sound and Fury | |
|---|---|
DVD cover |
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| Directed by | Josh Aronson |
| Produced by | Josh Aronson Jackie Roth Julie Sacks Roger Weisberg |
| Editing by | Ann Collins |
| Release date(s) | 2000 |
| Running time | 80 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Sound and Fury is 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. The film was nominated for several awards, including an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.[1]
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The film follows the Artinian extended family with deafness through three generations over a year and a half, focusing on two brothers — Peter Artinian, who is deaf and Chris Artinian, who has proficient hearing — and their wives and children. Chris and Mari Artinian (who is a Child of Deaf Adult) find out that one of their newborn twins is deaf. They begin to research the cochlear implant and its advantages and disadvantages. While this is going on, Heather, Peter and Nita's oldest child, starts asking for an implant as well. The brothers, along with grandparents on both sides, become embroiled in a bitter argument over the importance of deafness, the best form of education for their kids, and the controversy of cochlear implants for young children. For Peter and his wife, Nita, it's their fear of losing a child to the "hearing world", and her losing the importance of Deaf culture, which concerns them. They ultimately decide to raise their children in a deaf-friendly community within the state of Maryland, while Chris and Mari's infant, Peter, is given cochlear implant surgery.
In the follow-up documentary Sound and Fury: 6 Years later, Heather is now 12 years old, and she, her 2 deaf siblings, her mother and members of her extended deaf family have all opted for the implant device. The article summarizing the documentary's events describes her as having clear speech, living in a 'mainstreamed' world, interacting with hearing people, and earning high grades in school. These are goals lauded by the oralist movement. The girl appears to have achieved success by the oralist movement's definition in spite of living in an environment oralist educators strive to avoid as best as possible: her family is all deaf, she attended deaf schools and interacted primarily in the deaf culture, and had little to no intelligible speech in the first documentary. She was able to possess a deaf heritage, use ASL as a primary language, with little spoken language exposure or stimulation until she was implanted at 9, and still, she was depicted here as having succeeded orally.