From the start, it was hailed as one of the year's best films. After its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2021, Apple bought the distribution rights at a premium price, adding it to Apple TV+. Yet in Italy, Sian Heder's CODA is getting a theatrical release as well, following its Italian premiere at the Turin Film Festival. The title is an acronym: child of deaf adult, meaning a hearing person with one or both deaf parents. Though not heavily promoted, it's an American remake of the 2014 French film La Famille Bélier, which found success in Europe (and less so in the US). The plot is similar despite inevitable geographic differences: a girl living with her deaf parents and brother helps them navigate life and work, possesses a remarkable singing talent, and dreams of studying music—a passion she cannot share with her family, unlike so much else in her daily existence.
The French film played lighter, with comedic moments throughout. This version is more dramatic, though not without its laughs. Deafness functions here as a less comic element; one crucial scene was actually rewritten to challenge the casual mockery of the unfamiliar. Most importantly, CODA makes a fundamental choice the original did not: deaf characters are played by deaf actors. The French version was criticized for this omission. Here, the opposite happened. The film engaged the deaf community from the start, and was warmly received—featuring a recognizable face: the protagonist's mother is Marlee Matlin, the Oscar winner for Children of a Lesser God.
This may explain another significant change: sign language dialogue has no voice-over. It seems obvious, but in the French film the protagonist repeated almost everything she signed aloud—not for anyone in the movie, but for us. The filmmakers feared too much silence. Years later, audiences have matured. We can now follow sign language dialogue with subtitles alone, with no sound at all, making it far more authentic.
So we have a more truthful, more respectful film. Yet it must grapple with an enduring tension: how deaf parents and a hearing child relate to music—a potential fracture in an otherwise close family. You feel the latent unease of two parents whose daughter hears, and thus cannot fully enter their community. But every adjustment from the original—in story structure, tone, casting—softens the conflict, renders it more genuine. The choice to make them a fishing family fighting publicly for the livelihood of their community adds another dimension: the refusal to surrender, the determination to succeed when failure seems certain.