inclusive Short Film Programme

Creating an inclusive short film programme

It can’t be as hard as everyone always says, was the slightly, or let’s say extremely arrogant thought we had at Mo&Friese when deciding three years ago to provide our annual short film programme for German cinemas with audio description and subtitles for the deaf. Why hadn’t we done this all along? Why wasn’t everyone doing it? Wasn’t short film the perfect medium for this?

Ambitiously we planned not to simply “have the films translated”, but to get children themselves involved. Hearing and non-hearing children would work as duos on subtitles; sighted and non-sighted children would cooperate on an audio description. Covid pushed the workshops back and when, two years later, we were finally ready for take-off, we looked at our plans with different, far more realistic eyes.

Fortunately, we found great allies who gently but firmly explained to us how much more work this concept would include... Audio film author Marit Bechtloff and sign language coach Susanne Held both never led a workshop with kids before but their great sensibility, creativity, organisation and improvisation skills have saved us.

Audio description

Since blind children are usually not among the target group of a film festival we had no network to find them. We ended up with a team of kids ranging from sighted to completely blind, willing to dedicate three days of their autumn holidays to learning about the art of audio description, transmitting all the information from a visual medium into spoken language and synchronising texts with dialogues. Under the guidance of a blind and a sighted author, superb texts were created for five short films, which the children then recorded themselves. Both the writing and recording were impressive, seeing them break into collective laughing cramps about mispronounced words while recording.

Sign language

One of our naive mistakes was that we never considered how deaf children (like any other child) can’t necessarily read subtitles at the age of six. So we changed plans and prepared for a recorded sign language translation. But then we were confronted with the question of how deaf children should communicate with hearing kids if not sharing a language?

With the help of an inclusive school, the sign language workshop was fully booked. And through the EiS-App (a pocket lexicon for German sign language) we found two hearing children able to sign and thus form a bridge between both groups. The joint search for signs that would render the spoken content as comprehensively as possible was great fun. The children signing in front of the camera were integrated into the film as a video window. There are two very skilled video and audio technicians to whom we are forever in their debt!

At the end of April we celebrated the premiere of our programme with some very proud workshop kids facing a large, heterogeneous audience.

The programme MO&FRIESE UNTERWEGS IN DER NATUR is now available with or without German audio description or translation into sign language.

The Short Cut column is published with the help of the Mo&Friese KinderKurzFilmFestival dedicated to short films, as a part of the Hamburg Short Film Agency.