Jean-Claude Poulain

The films and methods of Nicolas Philibert, maker of Etre et avoir, have shown him to be one of contemporary cinema’s most acclaimed documentarists. In The Land of the Deaf is an elegantly spare and thoughtful portrait of the rich, diverse, but often isolated culture of the deaf community. The film has tremendous power and value: it educates and transports us to another way of occupying this world, and it does so in a pleasurable, unrushed and intelligent fashion.

Ten years after their Upper Sixth, Bruno, Momo, Leon and Alain meet together in the waiting room of a maternity hospital. The father of the awaited baby is Tomasi, their best friend at that time, who died one month before due to an overdose. They remember their teenage, their laughs, their dreams, their stupid pranks... a description of the French youth in the middle of the seventies. Part of ARTE's series "The high school years".

A TV movie that tells the story of a woman ready to do anything to protect her child, is above all a hymn to the couple, to the family... to love in short.