But it also tells McKenstry-Hall’s story as he navigates his family relationships and the loss of a best friend. The film explains that the main character lost his hearing after falling ill with meningitis as a toddler, and around the same time, his father left the family home. Not all of McKenstry-Hall’s family is fluent in American Sign Language, causing him to feel disconnected at home. In the film, he reflects on how isolating it was growing up having family members talk around him.
Ultimately, the film is a “coming-of-age” story, said Matthew Ogens, the film’s director. While the experiences and challenges are unique to the story’s subjects and the deaf community, many of the themes are relatable for all audience members, he said.
“This community has something to say and maybe they communicate differently, but that doesn’t mean less than,” Ogens said. “It means different.”
McKenstry-Hall graduated from Maryland School for the Deaf in 2020. In a video for National Deaf History Month this year, McKenstry-Hall described himself and his friends: “Like young people everywhere, we have big dreams. We have challenges to face, sacrifices to make, to make those dreams come true.”
The documentary short took 12 years to match with a distributor, Ogens said. Netflix stepped in in 2019. The film was released on the streaming service last July, and received the Oscar nomination in the best documentary short category last month.
Ogens said he knew from the start that he wanted to create a film focusing on a senior from Maryland School for the Deaf, but “a lot of people didn’t think there was an audience for this,” he said. Some individuals didn’t understand how a documentary could take place mostly without spoken word, since many of the cast members use American Sign Language to communicate. During the 12-year period, Ogens would regularly go back to the school to recast the project with a different senior.
“That was the hard part, until Netflix came aboard and like, totally embraced it and got it," Ogens said.
Ogens’s ties to the topic go back to his childhood, he said; his best friend growing up was deaf. He felt deeply connected to the subject material initially, he said, but it wasn’t until recently he understood he was drawn to it to better understand his friend.
After Netflix greenlighted the project, Ogens started following along McKenstry-Hall’s story in 2019, and wrapped filming by 2020.
“The most important thing to me is to take the time and spend the time to make sure Amaree and his friends and family were in a safe space to be able to be vulnerable and tell their story, because I didn’t want to do an observational film from my point of view," Ogens said. "I wanted to kind of be a conduit or a liaison for them to tell their story.”