This documentary airs on HBO from time to time. I think the next showing is May 8. Check your local listings - You've gotta see it! It's amazing. It's won many documentary film awards including a Sundance Film Festival Award.
"In this deeply personal memoir, filmmaker Irene Taylor Brodsky documents her deaf parents' complex decision to leave their world of silence and undergo a dangerous surgery to get cochlear implants -- the only one of its kind that can restore a sense. At the age of 65, Paul and Sally Taylor decided they wanted to hear their first symphonies, hear their children's' voices, and talk on the phone. How will this operation transform them, their relationship with each other, and the deaf world they might leave behind? This is a story of two people taking a journey from silence to sound. The question is, what will they make of it, and what might they gain -- or lose -- forever?" Irene wrote that preview.
Hear and Now is Irene Taylor Brodsky's first feature-length film. As a producer and cinematographer, she filmed polygamist Alex Joseph and his nine wives in the Utah desert, investigated the fragile state of American health care, followed a fetish clothing designer (HBO's "Real Sex") and produced TV documentaries and shorts on subjects ranging from Bollywood to bluegrass music. In 2004, Taylor Brodsky won an Emmy® for "The Rural Studio," her portrait of late architect Samuel Mockbee and his legacy in the American South."
I met Irene in 2003. She was hired to produce a feature for CBS Sunday Morning on the Rural Studio program in west Alabama. We became fast friends. She won an Emmy® for that feature and the Rural Studio benefited greatly. A year or so later she moved to Portland, Oregon. She went to a "Women in the Arts" luncheon and was introduced and the group was told of her award for her work at the Rural Studio. Amazingly, at the luncheon was a friend of mine from my days at the law firm in D.C. who at the time was the program director for the Center for Arts and Humanities for the state of Oregon. Irene and my friend Carol are great friends now.
What was it Walt Disney said? It's a small world after all.
