Dawn of the Deaf
2016 · 12m · UK
Directed by Rob Savage
Tones: melancholic, mythic, tense
When a mysterious sonic pulse incapacitates every hearing person on Earth, a disparate group of Deaf people find themselves the only survivors.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Rob Savage made a zombie apocalypse where Deaf people are the only survivors — premise subversion meeting formal audacity in twelve minutes.
Savage found the one formal idea that completely reinvents zombie apocalypse — deafness as immunity — and executed it on no budget before anyone else.
Savage inverts the zombie genre's default ableism by making Deaf people the survivors — a structural idea so good it became the seed of A Quiet Place's whole industry. BAFTA-winning shortcraft.
Festivals
- Sundance Film Festival 2017
- Sitges Film Festival 2016, Best European Short Film