Part of the Deaf Awareness Week Season
Living on the road and performing in a punk-metal band with his long-term girlfriend Lou, Ruben’s (Oscar®-nominated Riz Ahmed) devoted drumming, fast-paced life and obsessive routines all ground to a startling halt when he begins to experience intermittent hearing loss. Informed that his condition is worsening, Ruben is forced to abandon his music career, whilst actively fighting his diagnosis and dodging Lou’s concerns. Also a recovering heroin addict, Ruben is reluctantly checked into an isolated addiction facility for the Deaf community, where he meets recovering alcoholic Joe (Oscar®-nominated Paul Raci), who lost his hearing in the Vietnam War. Living amongst a Deaf community who accept him just as he is, a frustrated Ruben wrestles with the impulse to return to his old routines or find peace and liberation in the stillness of his new life. Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal is a vivid and immersive look inside Ruben’s experience, utilising innovative sound design to depict a powerful new perspective of deafness and Deaf culture and present captioning to advocate for genuinely accessible film-making.
