Unheard

Without her hearing aid—broken and beyond repair—the life of young Lu is impossibly complicated. She can communicate only through sign language, isolated from the world around her. Her parents, Portuguese immigrants in Britain struggling to raise her along with an older son and a newborn, lack the money to fix or replace it. Then mysterious bruises appear on Lu's back. The social services respond. The family is flagged as "at risk." The state believes it has the right to intervene.
Listen, the debut feature of director Ana Rocha de Sousa, exposes the rigidity and blind spots of British child protection law. The filmmaker gives voice to parents whose children have been taken from them—parents whose histories we are not shown, so we won't prejudge them, and for whom we inevitably feel enormous empathy. The contrast is brutal. The social services system must make quick decisions, often from premises far darker than ours; we see only fragments of the family's truth, not the full picture that might save them. The film is brief, so the clash with bureaucracy hits hard and suffocates. It's David against Goliath, except the real stakes—the safety and wellbeing of a child—vanish into the machinery. And the one who pays is the most vulnerable of all: the deaf girl whom no one outside her family seems to care for. She is played by Maisie Sly, who appeared in the Oscar-winning short The Silent Child.
At the Venice Film Festival, the film won several major awards, including best debut feature. The director was visibly more moved than any other winner who took the stage that night—and the only one wearing a transparent mask.