The love between Deaf couple John and Agnes blossomed during the Troubles, the late-20th Century 30-year period of sectarian warfare in Northern Ireland. He was Catholic and she was Protestant and their respective parents objected to their being together. And against a such background of such partisanship, bombs and bullets are even more lethal when they cannot be heard.
Seán is an almost totally Deaf boxer living with his hearing girlfriend Deyanna and their son Hudson. He loves his family dearly but he also wants to make it in the ring. The thing is, as long as he wears cochlear implants he can’t take the MRI scan necessary to be granted a license to fight. But if he has the implants removed, he will never again hear the voices of the people he loves more than anybody else in the world.
The Deaf gay couple Michelle and Kathy both underwent IVF, each giving birth to a daughter. But after contracting meningitis, their younger child Sophie also lost her hearing. Now Michelle and Kathy must decide whether or not to give their Deaf daughter a cochlear implant, which is a source of controversy within the Deaf community, many of whom maintain that Deaf folk are good enough just as they are, and are already granted a unique and expressive language in which to communicate.
In A Quiet Love, sold by Taskovski Films, the stories of each couple are beautifully told, their interviews to camera rendered even more poignant as they deploy senses of touch and sight, looking into each other’s expressive faces and reading each other’s signing hands.
“That ‘looking’ was something that we really wanted to capture all the time,” the film’s Irish director Garry Keane tells Business Doc Europe. Together with DOP Michael O’Donovan, he devised a multi-camera approach during the interviews. “All the master interviews had three cameras on them, so that we could get not only the two-shot with the pair of them in it, and we see them looking left and right at each other, but also to have close-ups on them. We could cut in and really capture that moment when something serious was being said, or something happy was being said, or something loving was being said.”
The John and Agnes segment has dramatised sections (or ‘memory’ sequences, as Keane puts it) which recreate aspects of their early lives together. Given the paucity of images from those years, this was an essential decision. “A story that’s 66 years long, it’s a bit hard with only four photographs and no video to play with, so you have to find a way to portray those special moments that existed, as they were children growing up together,” says Keane. “So we cast three different Agneses and three different Johns, and tried to step through three different phases of their lives from early years growing up.”
Keane and DOP O’Donovan set out to create an elegiac, romantic, almost other-worldly effect in telling John and Agnes’s story. “It’s a special array of lenses that Michael uses to get those soft sides and corners, and to twist the frame,” the director tells BDE. “We throw filters and create certain flares, and create certain kinds of effects on the corners of lenses…because it was such a memory piece, and it has that sort of an impressionistic feel to it.”
This impressionistic sense is further enhanced by a rich and expressive sound design. “My aim was to create an immersive soundscape, guiding the audience aurally through the diverse audio landscapes of our contributors,” says Keane. “Following a sonic spectrum from complete silence to partial hearing, audiences experience the world as they do. As the film progresses, viewers begin to understand how different the world is with an alternative soundtrack—or none at all—as this film challenges their experience and perception of sound.”
The production wasn’t without its fraught moments, as the filmmakers observed Seán wrestle with his dilemma of whether or not to pursue his boxing dream. “We weren’t in any way associated with driving that, influencing that in any way, obviously. We’re documentary makers, we just wait and see what happens…and portrayed that side of his story as best we could. He just made the decision, and we developed that end of his storyline, and he seems like a very, very happy man to have taken that [eventual] decision.” As to what that decision was, viewers will have to watch the film.
The other emotional wrench for Keane was in following the story of Michelle and Kathy and their Deaf daughter Sophie, “who is the most endearing child you have ever met in your entire born day,” he says. “The two mothers were really fretting, and constantly worrying about her welfare. That really had us on our toes, in terms of, ‘God, I hope nothing happens in the course of making this’…but thankfully, it didn’t, so we came out the other end.”
Impact
In their notes for the film, producers Anne Heffernan and Seán Herlihy (Curious North Productions) outline their Impact strategy for the film. “A Quiet Love aims to transform misconceptions about the Deaf community by authentically representing Deaf experiences, while supporting training and employment for Deaf filmmakers,” she says. “Allowing audiences a rare window into this largely hidden community can foster empathy, understanding and generate critical discussion around the message that societal barriers and attitudes create more challenges for Deaf people than their physical deafness.”
Their Impact goals are to tackle the persistent inequality and barriers to education, employment, healthcare and social spaces experienced by the Deaf community; push for the recognition of sign language as an official language, through the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; enable authentic representation of Deaf people in the media and create more opportunities for Deaf filmmakers in the film industry, and to champion the preservation of Deaf history and culture, which is currently under threat of being erased.
“She’s a very, very smart lady. Anne could run Ireland. Maybe she will one day,” Keane says of producer Heffernan, with whom he first worked on These Walls Can Talk, a harrowing story of abuse in a Deaf boys’ school and its lasting impact on its survivors. “She’s such a thorough producer, so involved in everything she does. And especially in the Deaf community, she has a passion that goes back years since she did her first deaf programming, and then learned to sign. So it’s more than a gig with Anne. When it comes to this film, and other Deaf films that we’ve made, you know, it’s a complete passion.”
Doc Edge 2025 has also programmed Garry Keane’s Gaza (2019), co-directed with Andrew McConnell. The film, which premiered at Sundance 2019, portrays the everyday life of Gazan citizens. It was selected as the Irish entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards.
