I Want to Tell You Something

Shot in a minimal style with no additional music, I Want to Tell You Something documents a year in the life of a family with one deaf and one hearing twin. Through interviews with the parents and incidents involving the three-year-olds, director Martin Nguyen paints a poignant picture of a family compelled to communicate in an unusual language. The parents speak openly of the dispair that seized them when they were first informed of their son's deafness, but have learned to cope and communicate well with Oskar.

Whilst the parents still stuggle with sign language, Oskar's twin brother is necessarily growing up as a functioning bilingual. Nguyen's clever use of sound and visual cues effectively demonstrates the peculiarities of this family's life: he shows them having conversations through windows - something speakers of oral-auditory languages are unable to do - and at one point plays white noise over a game involving a drum which Oskar loses because he, like us in this instance, cannot hear the beats. Nuancing the value of sight and depreciating sound, the film opens our eyes to a peculiar lifestyle in which the roles of the senses have been shuffled. The importance of sound in both life and cinema becomes all too clear.