Logline

In the Deaf world, there is no universal sign language – every country has its own. But in three bars across Bologna, Vilnius, and Kyiv, people who share no common language keep trying to reach each other. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Synopsis

We’re not making a film about sign language. We’re making a film in sign language – where cinematic form and linguistic form are inseparable, where the image thinks in gestures, and the edit breathes in spatial rhythm. This is hybrid documentary as sensory translation. The camera doesn’t observe the Deaf world – it inhabits it.

Three cities. Three bars. Three communities learning to communicate across languages none of them fully share. And between them – five lives we follow not as subjects, but as people.

Several days a week – Deaf days – all three bars have a Deaf bartender working the counter. Customers are warned in advance: today is an experiment, and they are part of it. They may decline to be filmed; if so, they will not appear in the film. On the screens where football and basketball are usually shown, a silent live image is transmitted from the other
two bars – video only, no audio. A second screen runs basic sign language lessons: how to say hello, how to order a drink. Hearing customers learn. Not because they are required to – because there is no other way.

This is the film’s essential reversal: it is not Deaf people integrating into the hearing world. It is hearing people who, for once, are the ones who don’t understand.

Between the three bars, the three Deaf bartenders share their different experiences, their personal lives, the specific weight of their cities. They are not only observed – they actively create the connection between places. In Bologna, Alex sees Kyiv on the screen above the bar: the city he fled, where his mother remains. That is no longer abstract geography. It is an image on a wall.

We follow five protagonists not only into bars – into their personal lives, their loves and
betrayals, their identity crises and small victories. And we give them cameras. They film what they themselves find worth remembering.  

The film is not a solemn document about exclusion. It is a rollercoaster – funny and painful, sometimes simultaneously, in the same scene. At its most important moments, audiences will find themselves crying and laughing at the same time.

The three bars are not interchangeable. Bologna’s Senza Nome has been running for over ten years – the longest-established Deaf bar in Italy, where Deaf and hearing people have learned, however imperfectly, to share space. Vilnius’s Elektrit and Kyiv’s Negroni are
entirely new experiments: no Deaf bar has existed before in Lithuania or Ukraine. Everyone
is beginning from zero. In Vilnius, that zero is charged with the excitement and awkwardness of something unprecedented. In Kyiv, it is charged with something else: the city is being bombed. Many of Negroni’s regular customers have lost friends or family, or have loved
ones at the front. The same misunderstanding that is funny in Bologna or Vilnius carries a different weight in Kyiv – and yet laughter still happens. That coexistence is the film.

Theme and core idea

SEE WHAT I SAY is an observational documentary that treats sign language not as a subject to be explained, but as a cinematic experience to be inhabited. It positions Deaf culture not as the object of hearing-world curiosity — but as the film’s own grammar.

Three bars in three cities — Bologna, Vilnius, and Kyiv — are the film’s gravitational centres: places where Deaf and hearing visitors share the same space, where people celebrate, grieve, argue, fall in and out of love. For our protagonists, the bars are shelter — fragile, imperfect, but real. But the bars are only the meeting point. The film follows its characters beyond them: into their apartments, rehearsal rooms, bureaucratic offices, into their four walls and their silences.

In the Deaf world, there is no universal sign language — every country has its own.
Lithuanian Sign Language, Italian Sign Language, Ukrainian Sign Language, Arabic Sign Language: they are no more mutually intelligible than their spoken counterparts. This means that even among Deaf people, communication is constant negotiation — sometimes successful, sometimes not. This fact is not a problem to be solved. It is the film’s dramatic engine.

The hearing world has, for 143 years, suppressed sign language. The Deaf bars in this film are a real, living answer to that history: places where the suppressed language is the mother tongue, where a Deaf person is not a guest, a patient, or a student — but simply themselves. And where hearing visitors must, for once, be the ones who adapt.

Their stories reveal what the hearing world rarely notices: real silence is not the absence of sound. It is the absence of understanding. And historically, that silence was imposed — not chosen.

Context: the hearing world’s unfinished reckoning

The Deaf and hearing worlds operate by fundamentally different rules – and Deaf people have well-founded historical reasons not to trust the hearing world’s intentions.

In 1880, the Milan Congress banned the teaching of sign language to Deaf children worldwide, mandating oral-only education as the single legitimate method. This was, plainly stated, an act of cultural suppression: sign languages were prohibited in Deaf schools, Deaf culture was systematically dismantled, and entire generations of Deaf children were forced
to communicate in a language that was not their own. The consequences lasted more than a century. Only in May 2023 was sign language officially recognised as a human right, the Milan Congress formally condemned, and sign languages added to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list.

The reckoning is not complete. In Lithuania – as in many European countries – Lithuanian Sign Language (LSL) is recognised in principle as the native language of Deaf people, but its legal status remains inadequate. Deaf people are still not officially recognised as a linguistic and cultural minority. LSL is not legally protected as a living language with its own literature, humour, poetry, and history.

This matters because LSL – like all sign languages – is not a visual version of spoken Lithuanian. Signs represent concepts, not words or letters. They are kinetic expressions, not pictographic symbols. National sign languages developed independently of the spoken languages of their countries: the UK, the United States, and Australia all use English, but employ completely different sign languages. There is no universal sign language – just as there is no universal spoken language – and the assumption that there should be one is one of many hearing-world myths the film seeks to expose.

Hearing-world myths about sign language

The most widespread myth is that sign language is simply spoken language performed with the hands – that signs correspond to words or letters. In fact, signs represent concepts, not phonemes or lexical units. Sign languages have grammatical structures entirely distinct from the spoken languages of their countries.

A related myth holds that sign languages are primitive or overly concrete – suitable for everyday communication but incapable of abstraction. This ignores the fact that sign languages use movement, facial expression, and spatial positioning as full grammatical tools, encoding logic, nuance, and poetry with the same precision as any spoken language. Hearing people generally never try to understand it.

A third myth: sign language is one universal system worldwide. It is not, for the same reasons spoken language is not universal. A fourth myth treats sign language as invented – something hearing people created to communicate with Deaf people. Sign languages evolved naturally and spontaneously, exactly as spoken languages did. For Deaf people, sign language is not a communication tool. It is the structure of thought itself.  

The film does not lecture its audience about these myths. It places hearing viewers in a world where their false assumptions become visible and inadequate – through direct experience, not explanation.

Characters

The Deaf world is a closed one. A community whose language and culture was banned for more than a century has well-founded reasons not to trust the hearing world’s intentions. Our central task in developing this project has not been observation from a distance, but integration – building the level of trust that makes genuine collaboration possible.

We have been in regular contact with Deaf communities in Lithuania for several years. We arrived at the Bologna Deaf bar not as observers with cameras, but as people learning the language, looking for friendship. The basic Lithuanian Sign Language we had acquired in
courses proved unexpectedly valuable: however primitively, we could communicate with Deaf people, including those who use Arabic Sign Language. We did not merely find the film’s characters – we became their friends.

The film’s themes unfold through five main characters of different ages, genders, nationalities, and social positions. Their stories sometimes intersect, sometimes run in parallel, opening different dimensions of Deaf life. We follow them not only into bars – into their personal lives, their relationships, their daily textures, their joys and defeats.

ALEX – 34, Ukraine. Bologna. Central protagonist.

Alex is the film’s dramatic spine – though he would be the last to call himself that.
He fled war in eastern Ukraine. In the first weeks of his migration, he became homeless in Bologna – and filmed it. Every day, alone, with his phone. Shelters, streets, hunger, bureaucratic walls, unexpected moments of kindness from strangers. He kept a diary in silence, when there was no one to call and nothing he could say aloud. That footage is not archive material. It is the evidence of a life sustained by the act of looking.

He saved himself by finding a bartending job at Senza Nome. Now he is the bar’s quiet constant – known, trusted, present. We follow him into his daily life in Bologna: the apartment he shares, the relationships he navigates, the loneliness that does not disappear simply because there is now stability.

His closest dream – bringing his elderly mother from the bombardment zone in Ukraine to Bologna – meets the same wall every time. She refuses to leave. Her house, though under constant threat, is the life she built with her own hands. The distance between Alex’s world and hers is not only geographical. It is the distance between a future and a past that can no longer exist in the same form.  

Alex communicates in Ukrainian Sign Language – which means he is doubly foreign even among the Deaf. The Italian Deaf community at Senza Nome cannot fully understand him.
He exists in the gap between languages, countries, and identities. It is precisely this gap that
the film inhabits.

We give Alex a camera. He films what matters to him. What he chooses to show – and what he doesn’t – is itself part of the film.

ARNAS – 30, Lithuania. Vilnius. Main protagonist and co-cinematographer.

Arnas was born to Deaf parents in Lithuania and learned sign language alongside Lithuanian from birth. He grew up as his family’s interpreter – a bridge between worlds, fluent in both, fully at home in neither. He photographs, writes poetry, teaches photography workshops in the Deaf community. His hearing is deteriorating; complete deafness is inevitable. He
speaks about this the way others speak about the weather. He has been preparing for it his whole life.

What he did not prepare for: rejection by both worlds. Hearing people, realising he signs, tell him to go join the Deaf community. Deaf people, realising he still speaks aloud, tell him to go back. His family’s rejection is bound up with his sexuality. His relationship with his own body, his voice, and his future is the film’s intimate thread.

“Hearing people realise I’m hard of hearing and sign – they say: go to the Deaf world. Deaf people realise I still hear a little and speak aloud – they say: go back to the hearing world.”
“If I go completely deaf – no big deal, I’ll have my people. I’ll see birds singing and imagine the sound. Seeing will be enough.”

At bar Elektrit in Vilnius, Arnas works as a bartender – likely the first Deaf bartender in a regular Lithuanian bar. Between him and his customers, Lithuanian Sign Language becomes a live negotiation: a language invented in real time between people who don’t share it. We follow him beyond the bar: into rehearsals for the Deaf theatre project We Didn’t Agree to This, where he battles stage fright, collapses during the dress rehearsal, gets up and continues. Into the complications of his friendships and desires. Into the ordinary and extraordinary texture of a life lived in perpetual translation.

He also films. His wider peripheral vision and heightened sensitivity to micro-gestures become both his filmmaking style and the film’s own visual logic.

HAMDI – 20, Egypt / Italy. Bologna.

Hamdi fled Egypt facing double persecution – from a family that saw him as a burden, and from a local Deaf community that rejected him for wanting to work. He survived the journey through Libya, arrived in Italy without documents. He communicates only in Arabic Sign Language and International Sign, placing him at multiple removes from every system – legal, social, linguistic – that was never designed to receive him.  

His impulsiveness is both his engine and his weakness. He already has enemies in Bologna’s Deaf community. Bar owner Nunzia repeatedly rescues him from situations he partly creates himself. Without refugee status, deportation is a real and present threat.

The question the film asks through Hamdi is not whether the system will accept him – it is whether he can survive long enough for the question to matter.

GABIJA – 23, Lithuania. Vilnius.

Gabija heard during childhood. She lost her hearing completely as a young adult and now lives suspended between worlds – no longer belonging to the hearing world she came from, not yet integrated into the Deaf community she is moving toward. Doctors recommend a cochlear implant. She resists.

“I’m afraid I won’t be Gabija anymore. I’ll become someone else.”

The decision is not medical. It is existential. We follow her through the weight of this suspension: friendships that have grown awkward, relationships that have shifted, the slow work of building a new identity – language first.

VILIUS – 68, Lithuania. Vilnius.

Vilius lost his hearing in early childhood. He is energetic, ironic, slightly reckless, and utterly unwilling to be categorised as old. He joins young Deaf creative projects, sometimes bewildering the participants, always insisting on his presence.

“I’m afraid of getting old and don’t want to – so I came to you.”

He is the film’s moral anchor: a man who has already lived what the others are still approaching. We follow him into the private life of someone trying to outrun time.

THE KYIV BARTENDER – Ukraine. Kyiv.

Name not yet known – we are searching through personal networks, which is the only appropriate method for a role that requires genuine trust. He works at Negroni cocktail bar in a city under constant bombardment. When the air raid siren sounds, it reaches him
differently than his customers — as a vibration in his pocket and a flash on his screen: the Air Alert app, delivering the same warning through a different sensory channel. He is not the last to know. He knows differently.

Dramatic structure

This film has no script. It follows real lives as they unfold in real time, without predetermined outcomes. Our protagonists don’t know how their stories end. Neither do we.  

But we know what the obstacles are.

Arnas moves toward a Deaf identity that should, in theory, be his birthright – but the community is not a monolith, and integration is never guaranteed. His family’s rejection, his sexuality, his position permanently in between: these are not dramatic devices. They are the conditions of his life.

Alex has found a kind of stability – but his mother remains in the bombardment zone and refuses to leave. The distance between his present and her past is not only geographical. And his Ukrainian Sign Language keeps him doubly foreign even among the Deaf. He is a bridge that has not yet found its other shore.

Hamdi’s line is the most fragile. His impulsiveness is both engine and weakness. Deportation is a real threat. Nunzia’s willingness to help has limits.

Vilius is the film’s moral anchor: a man who has already lived what the others are still approaching. His presence gives the film hope – and irony.

Gabija must decide about the cochlear implant. The decision is not medical. It is a question of who she will be.

The three bars are not only geographical – they are emotional temperatures. Bologna: practised, natural, but never fully resolved – ten years of experience does not mean misunderstandings no longer happen; only that they happen differently. Vilnius: newcomer chaos, everyone starting from zero, misunderstandings at their most purely comic and simultaneously touching. Kyiv: the same newness as Vilnius, but beneath everything – war. Laughter and fear inhabit the same sentence, the same evening.

The three bartenders are the film’s spine. They are not only observed – they actively create the connection between cities. They share their different experiences, their personal lives, the specific weight of their places.

The webcam transmission between bars is video only – music plays loudly in all three venues. This means every viewer on screen – Deaf and hearing alike – is in exactly the same position. No one hears. Everyone only sees. For the first time, the hearing world is the one that needs subtitles.

Three distances:

I. The distance between languages – Vilnius. Arnas behind the bar. Lithuanian Sign Language as a grammar the hearing world could learn, if it chose to. We follow him beyond the bar: into rehearsal rooms, into his own four walls, into the photographs he takes and the poetry he shows no one.  

II. The distance between worlds – Bologna. Senza Nome as fragile sanctuary, not utopia. Alex’s phone footage as a second visual and sonic layer – Bologna when it was still foreign and frightening. Multiple sign languages in one room, none of them fully mutual. We follow the characters beyond the bar: into apartments, bureaucratic offices, moments of connection and rupture, the slow work of making a life somewhere that did not expect you.

III. The distance that cannot be named – Kyiv. Bar Negroni. A Deaf bartender and the city around him: ordinary evenings, ordinary customers, some carrying the particular hearing damage that proximity to war produces. No programme, no lesson, no guaranteed encounter. When the siren comes, it reaches everyone differently. He continues working.

The film does not resolve these distances. It inhabits them. It asks the hearing world to stop waiting for a translation – and start learning to read.

The path toward integration is long and uncertain. We do not know whether our protagonists will succeed – or whether we, the hearing, have enough tolerance and will to change ourselves. The audience will find out only by watching to the end.

Audiovisual concept

Sign language is already cinematic. It operates in four-dimensional space, using tools that directly correspond to the grammar of film: editing, scale shifts, angles, variable speed, spatial composition. The film’s visual language follows from this – not as a stylistic choice imposed from outside, but as a structural necessity that emerges from within.

Collaboration as cinematographic method

Arnas becomes co-cinematographer not as a gesture of formal inclusion, but because Deaf visual perception is structurally different from hearing visual perception. His wider peripheral field, his sensitivity to micro-gestures, his spatial orientation – these are cinematographic assets, not accommodations. The film does not “incorporate” a Deaf perspective. It is built from one.

More broadly, the film’s protagonists are also its makers. This is not only a practical response to the impossibility of being simultaneously in Vilnius, Bologna, and Kyiv – it is an ethical and aesthetic commitment. Deaf people do not only appear in front of the camera; they control it. They decide what to show and what to withhold. What they choose to film – and what they don’t – is itself part of the film’s meaning.

Spatial cinematography for a spatial language

A sign language dialogue is not linear – signs often overlap, speakers occupy simultaneous space. Conventional shot-reverse-shot editing would erase a significant portion of any signed conversation: you cannot cut away from hands mid-sentence without losing grammatical information. The Insta360 Titan 11K multi-lens camera is not a technological luxury – it is the precise tool for filming sign language as it actually exists in space. In post-production, we shape the frame geometry, adjust focus mid-conversation, and track lines of gaze that conventional filming cannot capture.

The film is shot continuously on consumer 360 cameras – DJI Osmo 360 and Insta360 X6 – unobtrusive, permanently present, quickly forgotten by their subjects. The Titan is reserved for moments when we know something significant is about to happen. Its deployment is a production decision, not a constant presence. This distinction is visible in the film’s texture: the intimacy of the everyday, punctuated by the full spatial precision of the exceptional moment.

Split screen as grammatical translation

In sign language, two people can speak simultaneously without interrupting each other. Split screen in this film is not a stylistic flourish – it is grammatical. We divide the frame following the spatial logic of sign language: parallel speakers in parallel frames, emotional peaks in close-up. The hearing world edits sequentially. Deaf conversation happens in parallel. The film’s editing must follow that logic.

The webcam transmissions between the three bars – video only, no audio – create a further layer of split-screen logic: three spaces simultaneously present, none of them fully legible to the others. Deaf and hearing viewers are placed in the same position. No one has privileged access. Everyone must read.

Sound as Deaf experience

We are not creating silence. Deaf people experience sound as vibration, air pressure, and spatial resonance – as something felt, not heard. The sound designer works with Deaf consultants to build sonic texture from the ground up: bass frequencies felt in the chest, vibrations travelling through floors, acoustic visualisations where reverberation becomes image distortion, tinnitus frequencies for those who experience them, selective silence that is never empty.

Each protagonist has a different relationship to sound. Arnas retains residual hearing – with aids, he can follow speech when he sees the speaker’s face clearly. Hamdi communicates entirely without sound. Vilius has been Deaf since early childhood. Gabija remembers hearing and has lost it. The sound design tracks these differences, giving each character a distinct acoustic world.

In Kyiv, the Air Alert app’s vibration and flash become part of the film’s sonic grammar: a warning that arrives through the body, not the ears, in a city that has learned to live alongside bombardment.

Colour as visual frequency

Research into Deaf perceptual experience has documented heightened peripheral attention and increased sensitivity to micro-detail. The film’s colour design is calibrated to this: saturated colour in the peripheral zones of the frame, desaturated centres – reflecting Deaf attentional distribution. Colour is used as emotion where hearing films use music. The colour scheme is unified with the sound design as a coherent perceptual system, not two parallel tracks.

Close-up as grammatical unit

In sign language, facial expression is not emotional commentary – it is syntactic information. A raised eyebrow marks a question; a head tilt marks a sentence boundary. Extreme close- ups in this film are not emotional amplifiers. They are grammatical accents, carrying linguistic information that the wider frame cannot convey.

Developing a Deaf cinematic language

Working with a Deaf cinematographer, editor, and colour designer, we are developing a mode of filmmaking that does not yet exist in conventional documentary production. 360- degree cameras shooting in 11K resolution; frame division following spatial grammar rather than linear sequencing; editing that tracks simultaneous sign language conversation; colour design calibrated to Deaf perception. The outcome of this process will be documented as a workflow guide, intended to be shared with other filmmakers working in Deaf visual language.

Conventional film distribution treats Deaf audiences as secondary – adding SDH subtitles or placing a sign language interpreter in a corner of the frame. We invert this. The film is made in Deaf visual language. Hearing audiences will need to learn to read it. For the first time, the hearing world is the one that requires subtitles.

Director’s note

The initial idea for this film came when an acquaintance – a builder – let me listen to what was being transmitted into his ears by an expensive hearing aid he had waited years to acquire. I felt immediate discomfort: a harsh high-frequency cacophony that obscured everything, made conversation difficult, made thought difficult. I felt relief when he removed the device and the ordinary noise of the bar returned – the fragments of loud conversation, the dishwasher, the pop music thumping from speakers. That chaotic mix suddenly seemed rather pleasant.

I understood that we hear the world very differently. And I began thinking about the relationship between sound, hearing, and language.

I had assumed – as most hearing people do – that sign language was a kind of prosthesis for Deaf people, helping them integrate into our world; that their integration into the hearing world was straightforwardly good. I was wrong. I discovered that sign language is a full language – not a simplified version of spoken language, but a completely independent one. That it is the native language of Deaf people. That Lithuanian Sign Language is entirely different from Italian or Ukrainian Sign Language. That spoken Lithuanian is the first foreign language for Deaf Lithuanians – not a mother tongue, but an acquired skill. That a unique Deaf culture exists, with its own literature, humour, and history. And many other things I had not expected to find.

I understood that I needed to make a film. Not a film about hearing disability, but a film made with Deaf people – allowing them to express themselves, to articulate their pain and joy through artistic means, to show how they see the world. My task is to give audiences the opportunity to see, feel, and know that world which exists alongside ours – and which we have consistently refused to learn.

Observational documentary dramaturgy is typically finalised during the rough cut. The film’s dramatic architecture will follow classical arc principles – what unites our protagonists is not a pre-written resolution, but the open question of whether integration is possible, and whether we, the hearing, have enough tolerance and will to change ourselves. The audience will find out only by watching to the end.

Producer’s note

SEE WHAT I SAY began from a simple conviction: that a film about Deaf lives must be made with Deaf people, not about them as observed by hearing filmmakers.

Our collaboration with the Deaf community is not formal. It is the foundation of the film’s audiovisual form. Deaf collaborators shape the film’s frame design, editing, sound, and colour – not as consultants advising from a distance, but as co-creators working from within.

The film will be released simultaneously in two formats: a festival and broadcast documentary, and an experiential VR/XR project developed in parallel using 360-degree filming technologies. These are distinct works – different cuts, different emphases, different camera systems – but they share material, characters, and conceptual foundations. Simultaneous release positions them as two different entry points into the same world, designed to reach different audiences who then meet in conversation about the same experience.

Deaf rights, linguistic minorities, migration, identity, and cultural suppression are live debates in European cultural and political life. SEE WHAT I SAY speaks to all of these – not through argument, but through the immediate, unmediated experience of people navigating them every day.

We believe SEE WHAT I SAY has strong international potential – not only because of its subject, but because of the honesty and formal innovation with which it leads audiences into the Deaf world. And because for once, it is the hearing world that will need subtitles.