Tubas are vanishing. The director can't hear them anyway. This isn't a heist movie—it's a revolution.
A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.
Sound
Not designed for hearing audiences—it's an intervention.
Direction
O'Daniel invented a new cinematic grammar from scratch.
Editing
The telephone-game structure shouldn't work. It absolutely does.
Director
Alison O'Daniel
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
O'Daniel's 'Cinema of the Deaf' movement rejects captions as afterthoughts; they are primary text. This film screened with ASL interpreters at Sundance—not for accessibility, but as aesthetic.
The actual tuba thefts remain unsolved. O'Daniel never interviewed police—she interviewed band kids who never heard the instruments disappear.
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