‘Deaf President Now!’ amplifies the birth of a rights movement

“Deaf President Now!” — 3.5 stars

The events depicted in “Deaf President Now!” — a documentary revisiting the 1988 protest by students at Gallaudet University that led to the selection of the school’s first deaf president in its 124-year history — may seem, in the scheme of things, like an incremental advancement for representation in the deaf community.

But in this stirring telling by co-directors Nyle DiMarco, producer of the Oscar-nominated 2021 documentary short “Audible,” and Davis Guggenheim, director of the Oscar-winning 2006 documentary feature “An Inconvenient Truth,” the achievement lands with the force of the first salvo in a revolution.

It feels like no exaggeration to compare the Deaf President Now protest, or DPN, as it became known, to Stonewall, the 1969 riots protesting a police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar that marked the beginning of a new civil and human rights movement.

DiMarco and Guggenheim use archival footage to re-create a ticktock of the weeklong protest, which was sparked by the March 6, 1988, announcement that the school’s board of trustees had chosen a new president: Elisabeth Zinser, vice chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Of the three finalists, who also included I. King Jordan, then dean of Gallaudet’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Harvey Corson, superintendent of the Louisiana School for the Deaf, Zinser was the only hearing candidate. Students, who had sought one of their own at the top, exploded in anger.

“Deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world,” Jane Bassett Spilman, chair of the board of trustees, was reported to have said on the night of Zinser’s appointment. In an old interview, Spilman, who is hearing, argues that her comment — which she says she can’t recall and of which there is no recording — was mistranslated into sign language by her interpreter in the chaos of the moment.

In addition to conventional archival footage, the filmmakers use two innovative techniques to immerse viewers not just in the history but in the emotions of the moment. During interviews with the DPN Four, as the quartet of student protest leaders became known, the remarks of Bridgetta Bourne-Firl, Jerry Covell, Greg Hlibok and Tim Rarus are not translated into subtitles but rendered by four actors — Abigail Marlowe, Leland Orser, Paul Adelstein and Tim Blake Nelson — in voice-over.

DiMarco and Guggenheim also deploy an experimental narrative technique they call Deaf Point of View, which uses expressionist photography and sound design — moments of silence or muffled audio, a flashing lightbulb to indicate an alarm or incoming phone call — that invites viewers into the world and perspective of the protest’s participants.

As with Guggenheim’s “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” which blended standard interview footage, clips from Fox’s filmography and staged re-creations using a body double of the actor, it’s a radical kind of oral history, one delivered not solely by traditional documentary’s talking heads but by the more expressive hands, bodies and faces.

“I usually sign right about here,” says a smiling Covell, tracing the edges of an expansive, invisible box with his hands that almost fills the camera frame to explain his somewhat dramatic way of signing. “But I move a lot when I get emotional,” he adds by way of preemptive apology. At one point, Covell inadvertently knocks into the filmmakers’ boom microphone during a particularly animated answer.

It’s part of what’s great about this film.

There are contrasting moments of near-tears and speechlessness as well — the kind brought on by powerful feeling, not an inability to articulate. The message of “Deaf President Now!” comes across loud and clear: We will be heard.

Rather, it is Gallaudet’s paternalistic administration that seems slow to listen to the students’ legitimate demands, among which, in addition to the hiring of a deaf president, were Spilman’s resignation and the reformation of the board to incorporate more deaf trustees.

There are echoes here of many other protests, including those that have recently roiled college campuses in the wake of Israel’s response to the attacks by Hamas of Oct. 7, 2023. After the DPN protests began and the students locked down the Gallaudet campus, bringing classes to a standstill, Rarus, the fourth generation of a deaf family, recalls his grandfather phoning him on a TTY device — remember, this is before texting — to say, “Please respect your elders.”

Rarus’ grandfather later retracted that advice, ultimately telling his grandson he was right to stand up in the face of unfairness. But it’s a manifestation of what change makers all too often run into: ears that are metaphorically deaf to the obvious.

• • •

Streaming on Apple TV+. Rated TV-MA for brief vulgarity. In English and American Sign Language, with simultaneous interpretation. 99 minutes.