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| A Silent Voice |
Naoko Yamada's A Silent Voice is the anime tale of a bully who regrets his treatment of a deaf girl and seeks to make amends years later, only to discover that it's not so easy. Earlier this year it enjoyed a successful run across the UK, but it was never made properly accessible to deaf and hard of hearing audiences. Now Showcase Cinemas are planning a series of screenings to let people like its heroine see how they've been represented.
The screenings, scheduled for 7pm next Tuesday evening (16th), will be fully subtitled so that audiences can see not only what's being said but what other sounds are being made. There will be explanations when musical cues in the film let us know about the heroine's emotional state, providing a much more comprehensive viewing experience.
The charity Action on Hearing Loss has long campaigned for cinemas to provide more accessible screenings of major releases, and this is one of the first anime films to be made available in this way. The shift to digital in UK cinemas is gradually helping to bring about change because it means that almost all cinemas are now able to screen subtitled films - something which has also made foreign language films more widely available.
