I am a film director and producer. My first feature film “The Lives We Lead” was an independent Australian drama that chronicled the lives of four ambitious, emotionally-scattered characters over a 50-year period. The film was commercially successful and achieved international distribution with TLA Releasing (based in America) ahead of it’s worldwide premiere.
This is new feature film project, based on events from my own life, deals with two young men struggling to communicate with everybody around them, except each other. One is profoundly deaf and the other has a severe stutter.
I have had a stutter all my life and when it became clear that I would never “outgrow” it, I figured it was worth penning a memoir-toned screenplay that also supports the deaf culture, Auslan sign language and alternate speech pathology treatments that restored the confidence and communication skills that may otherwise have passed me by.
This film production will reunite the creative team that was behind “The Lives We Lead” and it’s commercial success, as well as raise the political issues surrounding the deaf culture and their language. There was once a time in history when sign language was outright banned. Current misguided social attitudes about the deaf and hearing-impaired communities range from “deafness equals defective” and “a cochlear implant will fix everything”. This film aims to raise pro-deaf values and restore awareness in a language that is unique to Australia and its deaf population.
As mentioned, this is a feature film project, so there is no limit to what budget we need. The higher that figure, the better we can achieve.