“You Know What? I’m Going To Go For It”: Deaf Stars Of ‘Audible’ On Jumping Into Oscar-Nominated Short Documentary
10.03.2022 - 20:33
/ deadline.com
At the Oscar Luncheon earlier this week, a young man sporting a gray suit and a dazzling smile rubbed shoulders with the likes of Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Jessica Chastain and Kristen Stewart. Unlike those luminaries, Amaree McKenstry-Hall isn’t an actor, but he is a star — of an Oscar-nominated film. A nonfiction one.
The Netflix short documentary Audible follows McKenstry-Hall during his senior year at the Maryland School for the Deaf in Frederick, MD. Oscar-nominated director Matt Ogens, a Maryland native, had long wanted to make a film about the school, but it wasn’t until he met McKenstry-Hall that he finally found the perfect charismatic subject to build his film around. McKenstry-Hall says he entertained some doubts initially about participating in the doc, conscious of how, in the age of social media, people can be picked apart.
“Right now, in today’s world, you could be perceived as good or bad… but I try to keep it positive,” he says, his words communicated through an ASL interpreter. “Then I just said, ‘You know what? I’m going to go for it.’ I am a Deaf Black man and I really want to show my pride within the Deaf community and share that with everyone.”
Audible explores Amaree’s involvement with the high school’s championship-caliber football team, the ups and downs of his relationship with sometime-girlfriend Lera Walkup, a fellow student at MSD, and McKenstry-Hall’s experience growing up the only Deaf person in his family.
“I do feel lonely,” Amaree says in the film. “When I was a kid, they would just talk around me. And I didn’t understand any of it, so I’d just go off on my own. When I run into hearing people out in the world, I feel, as a Deaf person, I am alone.”
Walkup and Jalen Perry, MSD