Logline

In Bologna’s Deaf bar, a misfit photographer losing his hearing, a refugee fleeing double persecution, and a war survivor find sanctuary in a cross-border community where silence isn’t absence—it’s a language the hearing world refuses to learn.

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.

In Bologna’s Deaf bar, lives converge across borders. Arnas, a 27-year-old Lithuanian photographer losing his hearing, was born to Deaf parents and grew up as their interpreter. Visually striking, non-conformist, queer, he’s caught between worlds: hearing people tell him to join the Deaf community; Deaf people notice he still hears and speaks, telling him to return to the hearing world. His family rejects him for his sexual orientation. Complete deafness is inevitable.

Hamdi, 20, fled Egypt facing double persecution—from family who saw him as burden, and from the local Deaf community that rejected him for wanting to work. After surviving Libya, he reached Italy without documents. Communicating only in Arabic and International Sign, he works precariously at Deaf bar, fighting for dignity while navigating bureaucratic limbo and constant deportation threats.
Andrii, a Ukrainian war refugee, escaped homelessness by bartending at the same bar. He dreams of bringing his elderly mother from bombardment zones to Bologna—but she refuses to leave. Gabija, 23, lost her hearing completely and lives suspended between worlds. Doctors recommend cochlear implants; she fears losing herself. Vilius, 68, fights aging by joining young Deaf creative projects.

Arnas films his life as visual diary. In Bologna, he discovers community, maybe love—an emerging intimacy with Andrii. Hamdi’s impulsiveness creates conflicts risking deportation; bar owner Nunzia repeatedly rescues him.

Using VR cameras, split screens, dynamic montage, we capture conversations hearing cinema erases. Arnas becomes second camera operator; his wider peripheral vision becomes formal tool. Sound design shifts between hearing perspective and Deaf phenomenology—bass vibrations, tactile resonance, muffled acoustic landscapes.

This is film about a linguistic minority living in an invisible ghetto—geographically undefined, here and now. The hearing world spent over a century erasing sign language; only in 2023 was it recognized as human right. Their world remains untranslated to us, hearing, not because we couldn’t understand, but because we remain indifferent.

Can our protagonists integrate into societies that refuse to adapt? We don’t know if they’ll succeed—or if we, the hearing, have enough tolerance to change ourselves.

Theme and core idea

See What I Say! is visually driven, observational documentary that treats sign language as cinema — positioning Deaf culture not as a topic, but as a cinematic experience.

Pushed to the margins of their former worlds, Lithuanian photographer Arnas and Egyptian bartender Hamdi find refuge in Bologna’s Deaf bar, where they join a unique local community communicating in multiple sign languages. Their intertwined stories reveal that true silence isn’t the absence of sound—it’s the absence of understanding. This film dismantles hearing myths about sign language and opens a door into a mysterious, misunderstood world that exists parallel to our own.

We, the hearing, spent 143 years erasing sign language. Now a Deaf bar becomes sanctuary for misfits crossing borders—linguistic, geographic, sexual—revealing that the real ghetto isn’t physical. It’s our indifference. Shot partly by Deaf cinematographers, this film enters a world where hands think, space speaks, and cinema’s visual grammar mirrors sign language itself—exposing the hearing world’s failure to translate what was always visible.

The film challenges dominant hearing perspectives, presenting sign language as a complete, cinematic language and Deafness as culture rather than disability.

Context: the hearing world’s unfinished reckoning

The hearing and Deaf worlds operate under fundamentally different rules. Deaf people distrust the hearing, and history justifies this suspicion.

In 1880, the Milan Congress banned sign language education for Deaf children worldwide, enforcing oral-only communication. This act of audism triggered over a century of institutional violence—sign languages were prohibited in Deaf schools, Deaf culture was systematically erased. Only on May 24, 2023, was sign language officially recognized as a Deaf person’s human right, the Milan Congress condemned, and sign languages added to UNESCO’s heritage list.

However uncomfortable for us to admit: we, the hearing, spent over a hundred years discriminating against Deaf people.

In Lithuania—like most European nations—Lithuanian Sign Language (LSL) is recognized as the Deaf community’s native language, yet its legal status remains insufficient. It doesn’t protect LSL as a living language, doesn’t acknowledge Deaf people as a linguistic and cultural minority, and doesn’t guarantee their rights. Meanwhile, LSL isn’t simply spoken Lithuanian performed with hands. Signs represent concepts, not words or letters. National sign languages bear little relation to the spoken languages of their countries. The UK, USA, and Australia share English—but use entirely different sign languages.

Finnish Deaf rapper Signmark (Marko Vuoriheimo, one of our secondary protagonists), internationally celebrated for his music, argues it’s time to see Deaf people as a linguistic minority—not a disability category.

The hearing world operates on deep-rooted myths about sign language. These aren’t regional misconceptions—they’re global barriers. Different countries are working to legitimize and popularize sign languages and Deaf culture, but at the everyday level, hearing people remain guided by centuries-old myths and false assumptions.

Style / Visual approach

Sign language is inherently cinematic—it uses four-dimensional space-time tools closely related to cinema: editing, scale shifts, viewing angles (lens perspective), speed manipulation (slow motion/time-lapse), panning, etc.

We aim to create a unique visual style weaving image, space, color, time, and sound.

By treating sign language as cinematic grammar, the film develops new audiovisual strategies that challenge conventional sound-led documentary forms.

Director’s note

Like many hearing individuals, my understanding of the Deaf world was once limited, clouded by myths and misconceptions. My interest in the subject deepened through conversations with someone who had lost his hearing. I engaged with the Deaf community, enrolled in sign language courses, attended Deaf events, and immersed myself in literature and media about the topic. My aspiration is for hearing individuals to gain a deeper understanding of Deaf people and to uncover this fascinating world.
By giving voice to the deaf community, we hope to create a lasting impact that resonates far beyond the screen. With this film, we aim to debunk the myths and misconceptions of the Deaf community in the hearing world.

Myths and misconceptions

Although hearing people have some idea about sign language, they do not know exactly what it is. Most hearing people have a similar and often incorrect understanding of sign language.

Myth No.1: Sign language mirrors spoken language

Most people assume Sign Language is just spoken national language where gestures replace words or letters. But signs represent concepts, not phonemes or vocabulary. A sign isn’t a static symbol—it’s a kinetic, moving expression. National sign languages evolved independently of their countries’ spoken languages. This myth likely stems from hearing people’s widespread use of contact signing (calque language)—speaking while signing individual words. Hearing people don’t understand that Sign Languages are fully autonomous, complete languages, not a versions of spoken languages.

Myth No.2: Sign language is concrete, primitive, and without grammar

For a long time, people believed sign languages were suitable only for basic, everyday communication—incapable of abstraction. The assumption was you could sign “house,” “eat,” “heavy,” but not express abstract ideas because there’s no way to “show” them. Sign languages were also thought to lack grammar entirely, dismissed as mere “communication tools” for primitive exchange. This completely ignores that sign languages use movement, facial expression, body language as linguistic tools. Hearing people often imagine signs as pictographic—like Chinese hieroglyphs. An absurd comparison: characters are written symbols; signs are kinetic expressions. But it reveals how fundamentally misunderstood sign language remains.

Myth No.3: Sign language is universal

A common question: do Deaf people worldwide communicate in one sign language? Of course not—just as hearing people don’t speak one global language. Why would that expectation only apply to Deaf people? Sign languages are related, but not because they descend from a common proto-language like spoken languages—they’re related because of shared spatial grammar, a feature inherent to all sign languages. Can Deaf people from different countries communicate? Yes and no. Because sign languages share structural similarities, basic communication is possible. When languages share historical roots—like American and French Sign Languages—mutual understanding becomes easier.

Myth No.4: Sign language was invented for Deaf people

Hearing people often assume sign language was artificially created to teach or communicate with Deaf people. In reality, sign languages evolved naturally and spontaneously, just like spoken languages. They continue to evolve and change constantly. This is what distinguishes authentic sign languages from artificially constructed gesture systems. For Deaf people, sign language isn’t just a communication tool—it’s the structure of thought itself.