A few weeks ago, Kristen Lopez wrote on IndieWire about her struggles as a film critic with a motor disability trying to attend press screenings and film industry events. Accessible spaces are too rare, and those who ask for their right to participate are often made to feel like trouble. Just days before, the Turin Film Festival announced its 39th edition, listing every screening venue as wheelchair-accessible. But what about other disabilities? The vagueness troubled no one until a reporter pressed director Stefano Francia di Celle at the press conference, asking whether screenings would serve people with sensory, cognitive, intellectual, or relational disabilities. His noncommittal answer failed to satisfy Anffas Turin, which pointed out the absence of films accessible to those audiences—a gap particularly glaring given the festival's municipal funding, which ought to guarantee universal access. Producing such accessible films is expensive and complicated, and film festivals lack the resources, space, and time to prepare adapted prints. Still, Turin managed to show La Svolta with audio description and two films with easy-to-read subtitles. One of these, CODA by Sian Heder, screened on December 3rd, coinciding with the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. Already a Sundance prizewinner, Apple paid handsomely to add it to their streaming catalog, yet it premiered in Turin. The title is an acronym: Child Of Deaf Adult—a hearing person born to one or both deaf parents. It's an American remake of the French film La Famille Bélier (2014), which enjoyed modest success in Italy as well. The plot mirrors the original: a hearing girl, daughter of deaf parents and a deaf brother, helps support them while dreaming of a singing career she cannot share with her family. The American version makes significant changes. The tone is less comedic, with less irony rooted in deafness; deaf characters are played by deaf actors, and sign language dialogue is not repeated aloud for the audience's benefit.
Far grimmer is Il Muto di Gallura, the sole Italian film in competition. Based on true events, it tells of a mute boy caught in a brutal 1848 feud between Sardinian families. Once dismissed by everyone, he becomes a feared bandit, notorious for his aim and cruelty. His long flight from the law transforms him into legend, yet he still dreams of love—from someone who sees goodness in him.
The festival prize went to the Turkish film Between Two Dawns, a drama about textile factory owners struggling—not always successfully—to handle the grave aftermath of a workplace accident that injured one of their workers.
Barely after Turin wrapped, Cagliari hosted the seventh edition of the Babel Film Festival in early December—a fascinating and singular showcase dedicated to films about minorities, especially linguistic ones. By its mandate, sign languages count as minority tongues and have always featured in the program. The most striking and obscure is spoken by a Maya population in Mexico's Yucatán, shown in Boca de Culebra by Adriana Otero Puerto. It's a communication method born within a small, insular community where congenital mutism has spread across interrelated families over generations. The shared language binds them powerfully, yet younger members long to break the traditional isolation—isolation that has also caused genetic impoverishment.
Fascinated by hand movement, Paraguayan director Agu Netto—who long hid a malformation of his own hand—blends personal reflection with admiration for such expressive hands in the short Otra Mano. The hands convey a language alive within families and beyond. Netto died a few months ago, but his poetic meditation on the eloquence of hands was accompanied in Cagliari by his young daughter.
The Italian Sign Language short Intolerance by Giuliano Giacomelli and Lorenzo Giovenga is darker and more unsettling. A mute homeless man, nearly invisible to the society around him, performs an act of kindness for a mysterious woman. But she is not what she seems. The reward for his generosity pulls the ending into disturbing, near-horror territory—a perspective we struggle to comprehend.
Also worth noting: Con la S maiuscola by Marco Spanu won the FEDIC Cagliari Prize (though it didn't screen during the festival). The film captures deaf community life through archival material from the Istituto Luce.
Among the full-length features, the Maestrale Prize went to Ndoto ya Samira (Samira's Dream) by Nino Tropiano, in English and Swahili. It chronicles a young Zanzibari girl's determined effort to educate herself and escape poverty in a country offering few opportunities for women. The film ends hopefully—a story that exemplifies the festival's mission to spotlight communities, people, and languages the world deserves to hear.