Contours
2025 · 13m · Array
Directed by Aisha Amin
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A deaf married couple visits a modern art museum for a role-play date designed to rekindle their faltering marriage. When a small detail exposes deeper communication failures and the game unravels, they find unexpected reconnection in a wordless shared moment before an abstract sculpture.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Entirely-ASL deaf couple's role-play date in a museum, executive-produced by Issa Rae with Lauren Ridloff — the language choice is the film, and the small reconnection-over-sculpture beat is the right scale. Could be tender without being saccharine.
Entirely ASL with Lauren Ridloff, executive produced by Issa Rae's Color Creative, with a Director of ASL on set — the institutional and casting choices align with the formal commitment, which is the correct order. Reconnection-before-an-abstract-sculpture is a small, exact gesture.
Lauren Ridloff leading a thirteen-minute ASL-only piece with a dedicated Director of ASL and two on-set Accessibility Coordinators is the kind of production architecture you build when the language is the medium, not an accommodation. Issa Rae's Color Creative backing it tells you the resources matched the ambition.
Reviews
The story is brilliantly written, wonderfully acted, and gorgeously shot.
Cinematographer B.P. Edwards demonstrates admirable framing that transforms art into a shared language between characters. Both leads deliver stellar, nuanced performances that authentically convey relational dynamics even amid conflict. The film has an overwhelming ease as if one were watching a private capture of time.
A truly beautiful short film that exudes a feeling of familiar wholeness. Narrative. Excellence.
Festivals
- Slamdance Film Festival 2025, Honorable Mention, Narrative Shorts Grand Jury Prize
- Deaf Way Film Festival 2025
- Deaf Film Festival Austin 2025