The Way We Move is a new documentary centered on Amber Galloway, a star American Sign Language interpreter.
Galloway specializes in live music interpretations — which means she makes concerts and music accessible to the Deaf community by translating lyrics, rhythm and the emotion behind them into sign language.
She runs a training camp for concert interpreters. As the film unfolds, we learn about Galloway’s painful past and the lives of her students, as they come together over their love of music.
The film is showing at the Milwaukee Film Fest this Thursday, April 30. To learn more, Lake Effect’s Xcaret Nuñez is joined by directors Vanessa Dumont and Nicolas Davenel.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
What inspired you both to focus a film on the art of live music interpretations?
Vanessa Dumont: We were in touch with the producers of this film and it was actually a beautiful and lucky coincidence that we heard about this project. We were writing something else with the producers, and then COVID happened, and the project got canceled.
The producers had been talking to Amber, and we were like, “My god, this subject is so cool, and this woman is so inspiring,” and then we started to do some research about her. At that point, the producers were like, “Okay, the other project is not happening, and we are developing this one. What do you think about doing this film together?” We were like “Wow!” because we thought “The director who is going to work on this project is so lucky!” because it covers so many subjects that are really close to our hearts.
Even if we are not part of or close to the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community, we found that Amber’s profile and her mission in life are so powerful. It can overall change the perspective we have as hearing people, but also on how we can make music accessible for everyone. Once you start to think about making music accessible for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, you think about this topic of accessibility in a much broader way.
So that’s how we ended up working on that film. We've been working on this documentary since 2020, so it's been six years. We discovered so much about the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community, about the music itself, and how we can listen to music differently now. And there are so many more things to discover.
This documentary goes beyond showing the audience how interpreters learn to express music. This film takes us into Amber Galloway's life. How did you decide she would be the perfect person to center the story on?
Nicolas Davenel: Amber, she's been around for a long time, and she's one of the first to take music interpretation into something meaningful for deaf people. You know, there’s the ADA law that requires you to have a request to put an interpreter on the side of the stage for the deaf audience to interpret. But, as Amber explained, the first person who could kind of interpret, they would have that person on stage, and most of the time, the interpretation wasn't really good. So when she saw that, she put it in front of a broad audience. She's very, very much an entry point to the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community — she is between the two. She was hearing, and now she's hard-of-hearing. So she's immersed in the Deaf community and is a very important person. So. It was great to have her as the first point of view, and then from her, you can discover everybody else from the community [featured in the film].
What do you hope viewers take away from seeing this film?
Vanessa Dumont: The title The Way We Move can be interpreted in many different ways. Literally, because what we are showing is the way [the film subjects] move and how they're transmitting something through their body and through their mission. But it's also the way you can move and change your perspective on a topic. Like I was mentioning, deaf, not being a medical terminology, or not being your loss, but a gain of something else, could be, I think, the main message — How you can consider grief or loss, into the gain of something. Even if you’re not denying all the sadness and the difficulty of that, but seeing how people overcome their condition, whatever it is, to transform that into beauty each day and between them could maybe be the best message.
You can see “The Way We Move” on Thursday, April 30, at 4:45 p.m. at the Oriental Theatre. The showing will be followed by a Q&A with Amber Galloway.
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