SUNDANCE 2025: Deaf President Now!

While attending Howard University, my apartment was just few blocks aways from Gallaudet University. While I had no idea what went down on that campus for eight days in 1988, Deaf President Now! won’t ever let me or the world forget how four students in the world’s only Deaf university, found a way to change the course of history 124 years later.

With two Deaf candidates in consideration for the role of president, Gallaudet University students saw the possibility of finally being led by someone like them. However, when the board of trustees, comprised overwhelmingly of hearing individuals elected to choose  the lone hearing candidate,  student activism  forced a reckoning of more than a century of paternalism.

In his directorial debut, Nyle DiMarco alongside Davis Guggenheim and told primarily through American Sign Language (ASL), Deaf President Now! recreates an immediacy through immersive archival footage and experiential use of silence and sound.

What is not at all surprising is the elitist, smug attitude of President Spillman and potential incumbent Elisabeth Zinser ( a former registered nurse).  Both women stood firm with the attitude students need to have their “broken ears fixed” so that the deaf can speak, as well as, claiming  dead people are not ready to function in a hearing world is simultaneously ignorant and infuriating. These scholars may have been educated, but neither one of them could sign or read lips making it abundantly clear their only intention was to collect those tuition checks with as little fuss as possible.

DiMarco and Guggenheim make sure audiences are educated with the negative ideology around the deaf community sharing it all started with Alexander Graham Bell (whose mother and wife were both deaf).  He believed without words there could be no thoughts.  Shortly after the uprising, I. King Jordan was named President of Gallaudet making him the first to hold the position in 124 years.  He kept that position for 18 years and the university has had a deaf president ever since.

Sometimes showing up and showing out while draining those money mazes is the only way people with power and privilege pay attention. This rousing documentary is right on time as it reiterates how the power of collective action to demand meaningful change can foster self-determination and realize dreams long deferred.