Christine Sun Kim

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.

Deaf artist Christine Sun Kim signs the final scene in which the main character, Nyke, goes skinny dipping with her boyfriend Nature Boy. Three narrative versions of the story unfold simultaneously—the written screen-play, a version told by Christine in American Sign Language, and a voiceover reciting the exact English translation of Christine's teleprompter notes.

Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim thinks about closed captions a lot. And she lets us in on a not-so-well-kept secret: they suck. Christine shows us what closed captions could be, in a new story featuring original footage she captured and captioned herself.