When actor, model, filmmaker and Deaf activist Nyle DiMarco was around seven years old, his mother shared the story of the Deaf President Now (DPN) protests with him. They took place at the world’s only Deaf university, Washington DC’s Gallaudet, in 1988 over eight historic days in response to the school’s board of trustees’—chaired by Jane Bassett Spilman—appointment of a hearing president over several highly qualified Deaf candidates. The ensuing rallies and boycotts by the university’s students garnered national attention and marked a pivotal moment in civil rights history with an impact that extended well beyond the Gallaudet campus, paving the way for legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) passed in 1990.
Having graduated from Gallaudet himself in 2013, DiMarco was committed to sharing this history more widely and approached Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who became his co-director on the resulting documentary Deaf President Now! The compelling and deeply moving film features a wealth of archive footage, innovative sound design that immerses the viewer in the Deaf perspective, and fascinating new interviews with key figures of the movement including former Gallaudet dean I. King Jordan and the DPN4—Jerry Covell, Bridgetta Bourne-Firl, Tim Rarus and Greg Hlibok—four students who were at the forefront of the protests.
Following its world premiere at Sundance and subsequent festival screenings at True/False and SXSW, Deaf President Now! launches globally on Apple TV+ on Friday, May 16th. Ahead of the release, Nyle DiMarco speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about his approach to shaping the documentary, why he sees it as timely, and his favourite piece of LGBTQ+ culture.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Reveiw: when did you first learn this story and what impact did it have on you back then?
Nyle DiMarco: “I learned about this story when I was about seven years old. Fortunately, I come from a large Deaf family. I’m fourth generation Deaf, so my parents and grandparents are deaf. My mom told me the story about Deaf President Now as a part of our history. I was born 11 years after the event had actually happened, but it really impacted our community and I felt that impact growing up. I asked my mom at the time, ‘You mean there’s only one Deaf university in the world compared to all of the universities for hearing people?’ And my mom said, ‘Yeah, and this is what happened in 1988. We fought and we won during this moment of Deaf President Now.’
“You change so much over those years when you’re growing up and you develop your own thoughts and your opinions. Being part of the Deaf community and seeing it change after the protest and how it happened after 1988 was really impactful and interesting. I was also mainstreamed. I went to a regular public school in fifth grade and so I was around hearing people, students and teachers alike, and I realized that none of them knew this story. It’s just as important as any other civil rights movement that we were learning about in school, but the hearing community didn’t necessarily know about it. I think that says a lot about how much society values Deaf people.”
I’d love to know a bit more about why this was a story that you wanted to share with the world now.
“DPN is bigger than just putting a deaf president in charge of the university, this protest also helped pass the Americans with Disabilities Act and sign that into law. That was a landmark piece of legislation because it was so important in providing accessibility and resources to people who have disabilities and there are so many people who live in America who have a disability. It really impacted the political landscape. As well as the ADA, we also have Section 504 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act—IDEA—a piece of legislation that was able to come to fruition from the success of this movement and that impacted people who live their lives with a disability. We don’t want to move back, so I think it’s really timely that this documentary gets out there now.”
I understand that your co-director, Davis Guggenheim, grew up in DC but didn’t know the story until you appraoched him about making this film. I’m sure that there will be so many people, myself included, who find it on AppleTV+ who are in the same position. I’m grateful to you for making the film and sharing this story because it is something that we should all know about. Speaking of Davis, could you tell me a bit about how the collaboration between you worked and what you each brought to this film as co-directors and producers?
“Initially, about six years ago, we thought we were going to do a scripted version of this story. Then two years ago we approached Davis about it and he read through the script and said, ‘This should definitely be a documentary.’ That was obviously a key moment and then getting enough archival footage was a another really key element as well. We weren’t sure if we were going to be able to get enough, so we asked Gallaudet and they sent us a bunch of old VHS tapes. They had over 40 hours worth of archival footage so we knew that we’d be able to tell this story with that amount of footage. Our editor, Michael Harte, did an amazing job of putting everything together. From that 40 hours he picked the best four hours worth of footage and then the three of us—Michael, Davis and myself—sat down and watched it through to figure out what we could play with and how we could make this film.”
“Davis really wanted the Deaf audience to watch this film and have that sense of, this is my film and this is something that resonates with me as a part of this community, something that’s authentic and true to them. One of my ideas was to create “visual noise” which incorporates some sound design and we ended up calling it the Deaf point of view. It’s when we force the audience to switch between the perspective of the hearing people who were there at the protest and the Deaf people. Davis was always on board with these ideas. He said, ‘Reenactments can ruin a documentary, so I’m going to try my best to go with all of these ideas and have a sense of trial and error to come up with something new.’ We really wanted to break the mold of how we could make a documentary and how hearing people feel about Deaf people.”
These are the best reenactments that I’ve ever seen in a documentary. I know that the son of one of the subjects, Greg, is playing his father in the reenactments which adds another layer to them.
“Yeah, we were lucky to get Greg’s son. We showed Greg the first cut without any of the reenactments and he asked us what we were planning to do. We told him that we were looking for somebody who could play each of the four Deaf student leaders and that we were going to have to film it within the next two weeks. Greg was like, ‘My son looks exactly like me and how I looked back in the day.’ He showed me pictures of himself at 20 compared to his son and they look identical at that age. He lives in South Florida, so we were like, ‘Can he come up to DC for a couple weeks to shoot?’ Luckily everything worked out.”
The sound design, which you mentioned, really blew me away–the use of drums, percussion and the music that you’ve chosen and also the use of silence—it’s all incredibly impactful.
“With the sound design, we move through moments of silence and then sound, like the drums and the rhythms of people banging on the hood of a car, or the door that kind of wobbles when someone’s banging on it. Growing up, when I would watch TV that had Deaf characters represented they would play on what Deaf people can’t hear and would focus on that. Just because Deaf people can’t hear something, they can still experience sound in their own different way. So we wanted to make something that’s fun and shows what Deaf people actually feel and what they go through every single day. That was definitely one of my proudest achievements with this film.”
This is something that happened around 40 years ago and it could have been told in quite a dry way, but it is so moving. How did you go about ensuring that there was that emotional core to the film?
“When I first approached the DPN4 about six years ago, we had a Zoom call with all of the subjects and told them that we were interested in making the film and that we wanted to get their permission. They all seemed like they’d be willing to do it. We asked the four of them on that call together, ‘Did you all get along or were there any disagreements that you had?’ They said, ‘No, we all loved each other. Every day was great. Everything worked out. It was so easy.’ Then I asked, ‘Were you concerned about winning or losing?’ And they were like, ‘No, we knew that we were going to win.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, then we can’t make a documentary. This is going to be so boring if it’s perfect!'”
“Then we split them up and interviewed them separately. That’s when the truth actually came out and we knew that we could move forward with this. Davis was like, ‘I don’t want this to be a boring documentary. I want this to be something that really pulls the audience in and makes you feel like you’re on the ride right there with these four students. We want people to experience the emotions that they were experiencing. These four teenagers, who were only 18 or 19, trying to figure out how to lead this massive movement and the scale of this protest.'”
It is unusual in documentaries to see subjects be quite so honest about each other and that really helps to draw us in.
“Yeah, definitely. It’s funny because there were a lot of times when the four of them were trying to hold things back during the interviews. I sat behind the scenes and watched Davis interview them and because I speak their language I could see when they were holding back. You know when you’re talking to someone and you can tell that they’re holding back because the prosody or the tone or the sound of their voice is a little bit different. You can catch those things as a hearing person. I can do that as a Deaf person watching them sign. So while Davis did all of the interviews I’d watch as they were happening and text him in the moment and be like, ‘Hey, that’s a vulnerable point and they glossed over some things. Go back and ask about this again and try to pull more out of them.’ So that approach worked really great.”
As you were going through those four hours of archive footage that you mentioned, what were some of moments where you knew you’d found treasure that you had to include in the film?
“There was so much, but one of the biggest stories of DPN—something that people talk about a lot—is did Gallaudet’s Board Chair Jane Spilman actually say that Deaf people aren’t ready to function in a hearing world? We have never been able to find picture proof of that happening, so we were trying to look for a clip of her saying that quote. When we got that 40 hours worth of archival footage, we sifted through all of it, and there’s never a moment where she says that specifically, but watching her behavior within those 40 hours—the way that she’s looking at Deaf people and her body language—completely matches the idea that she would say something like that.”
“We showed some of the archives to the DPN4 and it lit more of a fire in them when they were watching it. Before, they were like, ‘Well, maybe she did say that line, maybe she didn’t’, but watching it back and seeing the way she was behaving and how she was talking, they were like, ‘Oh, for sure she said it.’ The four of them had never seen any of that footage of Spilman until all these years later. So that was a really impactful moment for us.”
She’s a fascinating character in the film.
“Yeah, she has a villainous personality, it’s like Spilman versus I. King Jordan.”
As you immersed yourself in this story and learned even more about it was there anything that surprised you?
“About six years ago I was thinking about civil rights in general and how this movement was a civil rights moment that people should know all these years later. When we had our first cut back in the fall of last year, we were watching it and we were like, ‘Okay, this is perfectly timed with the political climate and the landscape of what’s going on now with all of the protests.’ It was surprising to me that there were all of these protests going on but nothing is really coming to fruition from them and they’re not as successful as DPN was.”
“It got me thinking about the disagreements and differences of opinions that occur when people are protesting. Sometimes people aren’t able to move past that and work it out for the greater good of the protest itself. Davis and I see DPN as the blueprint of how to successfully protest, even though all four of the student leaders didn’t get along. Like Bridgetta wanted a female president, so she had her own turmoil with that. Then Greg, Jerry and Tim were able to overcome their differences to work towards this bigger common goal. I hope that when people watch this film they keep that in mind and that it inspires people about how to protest and how to see each other as humans and to overcome our differences to reach a common goal.”
Why do you think this specific story lends itself so well to discussing the Deaf experience more generally, as you do in the film?
“DPN is not just about getting a Deaf president. Like I mentioned, I come from a large Deaf family, I’m fourth generation Deaf. So I’ve seen my family members’ experiences, like my mom and the awful things that she went through when she was growing up, and the things that my grandparents went through and how their experience was worse than my parents and how three generations behind is even worse. There’s generational trauma that a lot of people go through, but we can also change through the generations because we’re able to depend on each other and advocate for each other throughout these different generations.”
“When we’re looking at the DPN4, they all come from Deaf families. I immediately knew that there was generations of experience that they were exposed to when growing up as Deaf people and so they were quickly able to come together to lead this protest. I think that’s a perfect entry point that allowed us to tell this story using examples from their past. My thinking is that people who were culturally Deaf were more ready to protest than people who weren’t because they knew that things could get better from seeing it from generation to generation within their Deaf family. People who didn’t come from Deaf families might not know any better.”
You graduated from Gallaudet yourself, what was your own experience of studying there?
“It was a utopia for me. By the time that I got to Gallaudet it was 2007, almost 20 years after the DPN protest. 95% of the employees at Gallaudet were Deaf, from the President to the faculty. Even if I had a hearing teacher, they were typically fluent in sign language and conducted classes in ASL. So it was a perfect match for me. Gallaudet really is the mecca of the Deaf community. I always say it was like going to Hogwarts for me if I could draw that parallel. As a Deaf person who went to a residential school for the Deaf growing up, coming from a Deaf family, I always looked forward to going to Gallaudet and was waiting for my time there. So to be able to get in, it just felt powerful.”
One final question for you, what’s your favorite piece of LGBTQ+ culture or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact and resonated with you?
“That is a hard question because there’s so much, but there’s a book called Bad Gays: A Homosexual History Book by Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey which takes a look at historical moments going way back to ancient Greek times. It looks at how many of the leaders throughout history were actually queer or gay or however they identified. It was an interesting read and it really helped to reshape history in my own mind. Queer people have always been here and we are still here.”
Deaf President Now! premieres May 16th, 2025 on Apple TV+
Leave a Reply