Framed around a string of unsolved tuba thefts in Los Angeles from 2011 to 2013, the film cuts against the grain: instead of investigating the crimes like a conventional documentary, it reframes them as a metaphysical experiment — how does the absence of sound affect our experience? The film reimagines closed captions, expressing stories and ways of hearing through text placement, font size, colour, and punctuation that’s equally playful and profound. The result is a vibrant new cinematic experience — part historical documentary, part poetic video essay, with interwoven narrative vignettes — that immerses you in a rich parallel world, where you “hear” the humming of plants, the vibrations in the air from Californian forest fires, a 70s punk rock deaf concert, a performance of John Cage’s infamous 4′33″… It forces you to reevaluate your relationship with the quotidian sounds of your life. Drawing on her lived experience as a d/Deaf/Hard of Hearing person, director Alison O’Daniel transcends assumptions of sound, silence, and language in this groundbreaking hybrid documentary.
The Tuba Thieves, by Alison O’Daniel, is a groundbreaking work of art, a wonderfully different, beautiful film that showcases creative captioning and visual and audio poetry.
Chicago Reader
Q&A on September 30 & October 2
Community Partner
Nyeisha “Nyke” Prince, Russell Harvard, Geovanny Marroquin, Warren “WAWA” Snipe, Ajia Jones
USA
2023
Spectrum
In American Sign Language and English with open captions
Coarse & Sexual Language
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits
Executive Producer
Wendy Ettinger, Maida Lynn, Sally Jo Fifer, Lois Vossen
Producer
Rachel Nederveld, Alison O’Daniel, Su Kim, Maya E. Rudolph
Cinematography
Derek Howard
Editor
Alison O’Daniel, Zach Khalil
Production Design
Mboni Maumba, Clover Singsen, Heather Quesada
Original Music
Christine Sun Kim, Ethan Frederick Greene, Steve Roden
Director
Alison O'Daniel
Alison O’Daniel is a filmmaker and visual artist. She has screened and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; Centro Centro, Madrid, Spain; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Art in General, New York; and many more. O’Daniel is a United States Artist 2022 Disability Futures Fellow and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. She was included in Filmmaker magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film and writing. She is an Assistant Professor of Film at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Atonement
A former Marine suffering from PTSD seeks a meeting with the Iraqi family to which he did great wrong ten years earlier in the Gulf War. Atonement navigates challenging, politically-charged psychological territory with diligence and sensitivity.
NAZA
NAZA is a codeword euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians it expects will be killed in an airstrike. This chilling documentary exposes the policy and process of state-sanctioned mass killings.
The Sandbox
Borders are the faultlines of the world. Kenya-Jade Pinto's doc examines how modern surveillance technology, bio-metrics and AI are combining to make land and sea borders as impenetrable as air travel, and suggests the unspoken cost is our own humanity.
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
Slavoj Zizek re-teams with director Sophie Fiennes for another wildly entertaining romp through the crossroads of cinema and philosophy. From The Sound of Music to Titanic, Jaws to The Dark Knight, Zizek offers new ways to understanding Hollywood.
The Pervert's Guide to Cinema
The Pervert's Guide to Cinema takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through some of the greatest movies ever made (Hitchcock, Lynch, Tarkovsky et al). Serving as guide is Slavoj Zizek, the superstar Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst.
You Had to Be There
In a strange quirk of fate, the legendary Toronto '72 production of the musical comedy Jesus hit Godspell launched a constellation of comedy stars, all unknown at the time but now known to us as Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Victor Garber, et al