Vimeo Marked September’s Deaf Awareness Month with yet more Disability-Centric staff Picks

Back in April, I ran a story in which I covered Vimeo and the New York City-based company’s celebration of National Developmental Disabilities Awareness Month in March. My reporting featured interviews with Vimeo’s Meghan Oretsky, who leads curation of the company’s Staff Picks program, as well as 5-time Staff Pick honoree Case Jernigan. Jernigan, an indie filmmaker, spoke with me about his latest Staff Pick selection in Noggin, a 7-minute short chronicling his journey as he copes with multiple sclerosis. As I wrote in the spring, Vimeo’s Staff Picks aim to “shine the proverbial spotlight on work from indie artists exactly like Jernigan—to wit, people who hail from marginalized and underrepresented communities whose work is oftentimes overlooked by algorithms designed to cater towards mainstream audiences.” Indeed, Oretsky herself explained, since 2008, Staff Picks has stood as “a collection of the best short films in the world” created by emerging and established, independent filmmakers.

A few months later, Vimeo is back with more Staff Picks, this time for Deaf Awareness Month. September is Deaf Awareness Month, and Vimeo marked the occasion last month by bestowing Staff Picks to two films centering Deaf people: Breaking Silence and Contours. The former, made by Amy Bench, is a documentary delving into the advocacy of incarcerated Deaf people, while the latter is a film, from Aisha Amin, about a Deaf couple working hard to rekindle their relationship. Notably, Contours showed at the Deaf Way Film Festival. The event, held at Gallaudet University in Washington DC earlier this month, is described as “a four-day celebration spotlighting the creativity, power, and stories of deaf* filmmakers and professionals in the film industry.”

In a recent interview via videoconference, Bench explained to me Breaking Silence, of which she’s co-director and co-producer, the origins of the film trace back to 2019 when she pitched an idea for a series to Independent Lens. One of the topics of interest was criminal justice, and being based in Texas, piqued Bench’s curiosity as her state has one of the highest incarceration rates anywhere in the world, let alone the United States. One story Bench pitched was about Leslie Estes, a Deaf woman who had spent a decade in prison in Texas and New Mexico. At the time of Bench’s pitch, Estes had been free for about a month; Bench wanted to meet her and, ultimately, try to tell her story.

“I wanted to show her journey of reentry into society,” Bench said.

Then the pandemic hit. The unknowingness of everything proved to be an elephant-sized wrench for Bench and team in terms of producing Breaking Silence, which ultimately meant interviewing Estes was logistically difficult. The movie took three-and-a-half years to make, finally premiering at the Big Sky Film Festival in 2023. However Deaf-centered the film is as a product, Bench conceded “our initial focus” was actually about incarcerated mothers. According to Bench, her co-director Annie Silverstein worked on a film called Bull in which the main protagonist is a mother in prison; what’s more, Silverstein worked with young people whose parent(s) were incarcerated prior to becoming a filmmaker. Breaking Silence, Bench said, is poignant because it sheds light on “a really compelling issue a lot of people didn’t know about, including ourselves: the lack of access in prisons for people who are Deaf or have a disability.”

“I think what drove us was the realization that a lot of people have never considered Deaf people in prison before, so the fact it still isn’t a topic that is widely known,” she said. “We felt it was an important story to share.”

For Amin, Contours has a similar scope to raising awareness of the Deaf community.

“My writer, Brian Cohen, he was thinking about ways we could showcase new kinds of talent on screen… showcase diversity in a unique way. We just kept talking,” she said to me about making her movie. “Something that was so clear was there was very little Deaf talent on screen that we had both seen, and we knew of some performers who were Deaf that are just fantastic. What better way to showcase a diverse film than telling a film about a marriage, which is such a universal concept. Martial problems, but doing it where we are intentionally casting Deaf actors.”

Amin emphasized the notion she didn’t want to put deafness on display as though it lived “in a museum.” She didn’t want the disability to be tokenized as usual and “shown to the world as a tragedy,” as is commonplace for most stories involving disability.

“I wanted to tell a story about how hard it is to be married and communicating in sign language,” Amin said.

Amin called making Contours a “humbling” experience, telling me she was forced to “check myself” during production because, as a hearing person, she was showing a community she isn’t part of. She leaned on her partners, including the team at RespectAbility, in an effort to maximize authenticity. As she mentioned, the Deaf experience is oft-overlooked by society writ large—and, pertinently here, by Hollywood.

As to Vimeo, both Bench and Amin shared similar sentiments about how the company was great to work with. For Amin, she said Vimeo’s platform is especially valuable to her as a young filmmaker; it’s even more valuable for someone like her to get a coveted Staff Pick. As a three-time winner, Amin feels “very lucky” to have received the recognition, adding Vimeo is so great in large part due to its accessibility. With the internet’s nigh ubiquity, a film like Contours (or Breaking Silence, for that matter) has much greater opportunity to be seen and lauded via streaming—especially given Vimeo’s Staff Picks are intentionally human-curated. For Bench’s part, she described she and her own team being “really delighted” by Vimeo’s enthusiasm and said the platform is “the perfect fit” for Breaking Silence amidst Deaf Awareness Month.

Looking towards the future, both Amin and Bench expressed enthusiasm for, and commitment to, spotlighting the disability community in future projects. Both films have received tremendous feedback from Deaf audiences who’ve said the movies have proven deeply resonant. Bench told me Breaking Silence serves as a microcosm of how disabled people are treated, noting there are “so many topics we need to be talking about.” For Amin, making Contours proved so profound she readily admitted to it “changing” her as a person—so much so, she revealed her next project features a Deaf character who communicates in ASL. Amin is all-in as an ally of the Deaf community.

“I don’t think I’ll ever write another script without featuring Deaf or disabled talent,” she said of her future plans. “If I can do anything to shift a little of that scale in the industry, then I’m going to do it as a director. I’m going to always consider hiring Deaf talent because it’s underrepresented in Hollywood… anything I can do, I’m going to do it.”