Louder than Words: Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy on The Tribe

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothing yet!” When Al Jolson startled cinemagoers with that epochal line in 1927’s The Jazz Singer, he didn’t know how prophetic his words would be. In the decades that have elapsed since sound entered the movies, the chatter has been near-constant. Whether through spoken dialogue or voiceover, subtitled or dubbed, the sound of people talking has become such an integral part of the cinema experience that its occasional absence can have a bracing effect. Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe is a film in which we don’t hear a single word uttered, and yet its characters never stop communicating with each other. The entire film is populated by deaf actors whose lingua franca is Ukrainian sign language and none of what they say is translated for viewers, so unless you’re part of the small subset of people who can understand their gestures, you’ll need to find other means to decipher this story.

Read the rest of my interview with Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy at The Skinny