Alison O'Daniel post screening talk

A conversation with Filmmaker and artist Alison O’Daniel and Nyeisha “Nyke” Prince about Alison's debut feature film, The Tuba Thieves.
The Tube Thieves stems from a radical inquiry into what it means to listen. As a d/Deaf/hard of hearing artist, O’Daniel’s practice moves across film, sculpture, and performance to investigate how we hear, experience, and understand sound.
In conjunction with the release of her film, the Walker invited O’Daniel to embark on a long-form cinema residency. Marking its first stage, the cinema series Alison O’Daniel: Are You Listening? O’Daniel utilizes the Walker Cinema as a space to further the inquiries she began with The Tuba Thieves. Her feature was made within and collaborating with a d/Deaf community; this series, however, examines films made by hearing filmmakers that prominently feature d/Deaf actors and characters in their story lines. Together, these engagements ask the question: “What does a d/Deaf Cinema sound like?”
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Alison O’Daniel’s debut feature film is framed by a mysterious rash of tuba thefts from Los Angeles schools in the early 2010s. Using the absence of this central instrument for these bands as a starting point, O’Daniel’s film asks what it means to listen. Alongside collaborations with other Deaf artists, such as Christine Sun Kim and the drummer Nyeisha “Nyke” Prince, the film weaves in re-enactments of significant historical concerts in which audiences experienced music through silence-the premiere of John Cage’s 4’33’, the last punk show at San Francisco’s Deaf Club, and Prince’s surprise concert at the Deaf university Gallaudet on his Purple Rain tour. O’Daniel’s genre-defying film radically reorients the possibilities of what a d/Deaf cinema might sound like. 2023, US, American Sign Language and English with open captions, DCP, 91 min.
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