Filmmaker Charlie Ainsworth is wearing an incredibly Charlie Ainsworth T-shirt: a bit niche, a bit nerdy, a bit sarcastic; all about Deaf cinema.

“I vlogged before it was cool,” the shirt reads, next to a stylized photo illustration of a man whose crisply slicked hair and angular face stand in contrast to Ainsworth’s own wild shoulder-length curls and dark beard.

The man on the shirt is George Veditz, one of the first people to capture American Sign Language on film. His 1913 recording, “Preservation of the Sign Language,” is essentially a 14-minute monologue by Veditz himself, in ASL, on the development and ongoing importance of signed communication. It’s become a bedrock of Deaf history.

But 110 years later, Deaf filmmaking is still an underdeveloped genre.

Ainsworth, himself a prominent deaf filmmaker, hopes to change that.

The St. Paul native is the founder of Angry Deaf People Productions, an indie film company. His short films, including “Hamburger Airplane” and “How To Caption Your Movie,” have screened at festivals nationwide.

Filmmaker Charlie Ainsworth poses for a photo on his porch on Oct. 18, 2023, at his home in Eagan. His shirt, which reads “I vlogged before it was cool,” references George Veditz, one of the first people to capture American Sign Language on film in 1913. (Photo courtesy Charlie Ainsworth)

He spoke with us in ASL via an interpreter, David Evans. (A note that “Deaf” is generally capitalized when referring to cultural aspects of deafhood, itself a community descriptor that’s preferred over the medicalized term “deafness.”)

“Film has always been a Deaf birthright — I’ve always felt that,” Ainsworth said. “English has a written form to it, but ASL doesn’t. There’s no written form of our language. But we have film to preserve our language, so there’s always been a special bond between us and film.”

Dinner Tables and Angry Deaf People

Ainsworth’s upcoming project — one of them, at least — is a short film called “Dinner Table Syndrome.”

Dinner Table Syndrome is a common experience among deaf people, in which they’re left out of the kind of informal banter and social connection that takes place around a table.

Especially at major holidays with family members who cannot sign, deaf children are excluded from conversation and might not even know who unfamiliar guests are if adults don’t make specific introductions in ASL. It’s an unbelievably isolating experience, Ainsworth said.

“That’s traumatizing in many ways,” he said. “Any time we would ask for clarification or to be caught up, the answer we always get is, ‘I’ll tell you later.’ And later never comes. We learn that we’re not important.”

The film follows a 5-year-old boy who just received cochlear implants, electronic devices that are surgically attached to the skull and inner ear to provide some degree of auditory stimulation, but he hasn’t yet been taught how to use them. The boy is completely overwhelmed at Thanksgiving dinner and escapes, setting the plot in motion.

Ainsworth plans to shoot the film from the child’s perspective — garbled dialogue, an awkwardly low angle, brushed away by giant adults — to convey the real trauma of Dinner Table Syndrome.

It’ll be a short film, about 12 minutes, and is also a proof of concept for a full feature Ainsworth plans to make in the future, he said. He has an almost entirely Minnesota cast and crew lined up and estimates the budget at around $30,000. The plan is for the film to debut around Thanksgiving next year, he said, with two premieres: First for deaf audiences only, then for the general public.

FilmNorth, a local arts organization, selected “Dinner Table Syndrome” as a fiscally sponsored project, a designation that opens pathways for independent filmmakers like Ainsworth to benefit from FilmNorth’s resources and non-profit status.

Ainsworth hopes community support will take the film over the finish line. You can directly support the project online via FilmNorth.

The film’s script is fictional, but Dinner Table Syndrome is something Ainsworth — and probably every other deaf person, he said — has experienced personally.

Filmmaker Charlie Ainsworth (crouched at left) directs a scene in the film “Life, Captioned” in early 2019. The film was produced by his company, Angry Deaf People Productions, which aims to bolster authentic narratives about Deaf culture and provide resources for deaf filmmakers. (Photo courtesy Charlie Ainsworth)

Ainsworth grew up in St. Paul, near St. Catherine University. His older brother is also deaf. His parents and younger brother, who are all hearing, learned to speak in American Sign Language, but none of his extended family members did, he said.

And until his senior year of high school, he attended local English-speaking schools, where he was placed in classrooms with non-deaf classmates. School officials had cautioned his parents against sending him to an ASL-speaking Deaf school over concerns that it was not academically rigorous enough, he said; they argued at the time that it was better for deaf kids to conform to a hearing world.

When he ultimately did attend the Minnesota State Academy for the Deaf in Faribault, for his last year of high school, the experience was literally life-changing, he said. There, he discovered the existence of a dynamic, vibrant Deaf culture — one he’d essentially been cut off from. The education quality turned out to be perfectly fine, he said, and the socialization with deaf peers was perhaps more impactful.

“When I got to the Deaf school, I had to unpack a lot and realize that I actually love and cherish my language and my Deaf way of life,” he said. “I was never left out of the conversation, like I was when I was with no other deaf people. It built my pride and sense of who I am in deafhood.”

Another major commonality he quickly found between himself and other deaf people was a love of storytelling.

Many deaf people are so used to being left out of conversations and pop culture, he said, that when they finally find one another, the floodgates open.

“Deaf people often won’t shut up,” he said, jokingly. “We get together, and we’ll stay together all night long, talking. We tell our stories down to the finest detail. We don’t want anything to be missed.”

After graduating, Ainsworth studied theater and history at Gallaudet University, the only fully Deaf-specific university in the world, in Washington, D.C., and then earned a master’s degree from The David Lynch Graduate School of Cinematic Arts at Maharishi International University in Iowa in screenwriting. In 2021, he was selected as a participant in the Deaf Artists Residency, also the only program of its kind worldwide, at the Anderson Center in Red Wing.

He and his wife, new parents as of this year, now live in Eagan.

He launched Angry Deaf People Productions in 2018.

The name was chosen partly because it’s memorable, he said — but also, deaf people do indeed feel angry.

“Language barriers, communication barriers, the constant medicalization of our deafhood,” he said. “I’m frustrated with the system, not with my life. Really, it’s justifiable anger, and to me, that’s always been a big part of the Deaf identity.”

The Deaf Cinema Manifesto

Through Angry Deaf People Productions, Ainsworth is working to bolster a new genre called Deaf Cinema.

The exact contours of the genre are still being defined, and Ainsworth hopes he and other deaf filmmakers could draft a “Deaf Cinema Manifesto” as early as next spring.

“Hamburger Airplane” director Charlie Ainsworth, left, and director of photography Toj Mora, center, review footage during a shoot for the short film on July 24, 2020. The film was produced by Ainsworth’s company, Angry Deaf People Productions. (Photo courtesy Charlie Ainsworth)

But for now, there are a couple of informal characteristics.

First and foremost, Deaf Cinema films are made by deaf people. Deaf writers and actors, of course, Ainsworth said, but what about deaf cinematographers? Deaf gaffers and camera operators? Deaf prop builders?

Second, the themes connect to the Deaf experience in meaningful and authentic ways, Ainsworth said. Perhaps not every character needs to be deaf, and perhaps not every plotline needs to center deafhood, but the films should reflect the richness of actual Deaf culture.

Deaf Cinema could be an important intervention to spark creativity and launch careers, he said. When films aren’t properly captioned or don’t represent deafhood authentically, young deaf people may not develop an interest in cinema in the first place, Ainsworth said. Too often, a mainstream unwillingness to provide accommodations also means that deaf people are cut off from developing the skills and resumes they’d need to be hired by major studios, which further complicates progress toward greater Deaf representation.

And already, some visual hallmarks of Deaf Cinema are becoming apparent.

Deaf Cinema tends to have very little sound, if any at all, and a more symbolic, arthouse-film approach to cinematography, Ainsworth said.

Consider how a movie made for general audiences uses sound design to communicate tone and overlays dialogue and audio cues atop visual action. By contrast, a scene in a Deaf Cinema film might cycle more frequently between character-centric moments with subtitled dialogue and action shots that drive the plot, so viewers don’t have to constantly split their focus. These would be spliced in with cutaways to close-ups or symbolic visuals that build emotional and metaphoric resonance.

Ainsworth has seen his own filmmaking style evolve in this direction, too: In tandem with the development of Deaf Cinema, he notices his films are becoming more reliant on visual narrative, with less dialogue-heavy scripts.

“How do we portray the Deaf experience through action?” he said. “How do we change from dialogue into a visual storytelling mode?”

In Ainsworth’s view, what the Deaf community needs — and what Deaf Cinema has the potential to provide — is narrative plentitude.

It’s a term coined by the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen to refer to the power of communities having resources to tell their own stories en masse, rather than relying on one-off tokens of ‘representation.’

Commonly, Ainsworth said, deaf characters in popular media are written or portrayed by non-deaf people in a way that fundamentally misunderstands the Deaf experience as a state of loss.

In the process of trying to convey concepts like music and bird calls that deaf people are supposedly “missing” — itself a reductive and patronizing process for deaf people — non-deaf creators also ignore or even suppress the active, vibrant, unique culture that exists within deafhood, he said.

“When stories are written about us, it’s always from the perspective of what’s missing,” Ainsworth said. “But the irony is, we have such rich and deep experiences as deaf people, with a culture and identity. We don’t care that we can’t hear music.”

A world of narrative plentitude would portray Deaf culture authentically, with all the rough and fulfilling and painful and beautiful aspects of any life fully lived. Not sugar-coated, but also not reduced to a single archetype.

Ainsworth is building Angry Deaf People Productions, and the Deaf Cinema movement more broadly, explicitly as a vehicle toward this vision of narrative plentitude, he said.

Besides making films, the company is also planning to build an accessible online clearinghouse for Deaf Cinema resources, and Ainsworth hopes one day to create a private equity fund or similar investment vehicle so deaf filmmakers have their own pool of funding to pursue projects.

“My goal is to make the Twin Cities a hotbed of Deaf Cinema,” he said. “The goal is to make this the place where Deaf Cinema starts.”

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