In the mid 90s, New York’s subway trains were peopled by deaf men and women who laid small trinkets by passengers’ sides with a little note that said they were deaf and needed money for their education. They would come around later and collect the unsold packs or the one dollar bill given in exchange for the trinket. In 1997, it was discovered that these people were lured from Central America, under the pretext of an education in the States, and made to beg on the trains — in essence, a modern-day slavery ring.
“The story was on page one of newspapers for a day, buried deep within on the next, and disappeared altogether by the third,” says Brooklyn-based film director Maximon Monihan. His silent film, La Voz De Los Silenciados (The Voice Of The Voiceless, LVDLS), seeks to bring this story back into public consciousness.
Ask anyone in New York about the deaf people in the trains, and they would remember them, says Maximon, who was in the city to screen the film at Cafe Papaya.
“Most people thought they were faking the deafness for money, but if you paid attention, you would realise they were shy and shell-shocked. What they did was too degrading to fake it; there was certainly more to their story.” It was a testament to urban cynicism and apathy that few believed they were really deaf until police uncovered the story. “I’d seen these people beg , and when the truth about them came out, I realised that this was an example of how modern life numbs us to the suffering of others.”
LVDLS traces the story of Olga, a young deaf girl from Guatemala who is entrapped within the ring, abused by its perpetrators, and has no means to escape. Her ordeal is traumatic for the viewer too, as the silent film’s realistic soundscape recreates Olga’s claustrophobic headspace through low frequency vibrations that mimic what someone deaf possibly hears. “ LVDLS was always a silent film in my mind. But I didn’t want to use silent film techniques in a gimmicky sense. There had to be a reason for the silence. Most hearing impaired people register these low noises, so our sound designer Miguel Coffman took many field recordings to make a background sound that is a character in itself throughout the film,” says Maximon.
The lead character, Olga, is played by Janeva Adena Calderon Zentz, a visual artist who debuted in this film. Maximon met Janeva at a party, was taken by her distinctly Central American features, and convinced her to act in LVDLS , which is his first feature film too.
Skateboarding to filmsMaximon himself came to filmmaking from his former avatar as a skateboarder. “Skateboarding is a sort of renegade activity that young outcasts are obsessed with. While it is a competitive sport, its biggest attraction is the stunt videos that capture different personalities skateboard in their creative styles.” With this background in filmmaking with minimal equipment, Maximon set out to make LVDLS on a shoestring budget, produced by his wife Sheena Matheiken, an artiste raised in India and now settled in the States.
The film was shot over one year in New York’s subways and streets in black and white, with a few scenes in Guatemala in colour. This difference enriches Olga’s story of slavery and freedom. Through the shoots, Maximon says Janeva was in character, for many of the subway travellers in the film are real commuters responding to a deaf woman begging, not actors. “Our shoots would involve Jeneva slipping in through one door of the train, us through the other, and we’d quietly capture what unfolded.”
The result is a natural portrayal of what the slavery ring functioned like. The film’s structure too stays true to life, refusing to release the audience’s tension with a neat wrapped-in-a-bow ending. “I wanted people to question their own responses to such a situation, not absolve them of all responsibility at the conclusion by saying the ring was busted.” For a little comic relief, the film includes a magical penguin too, for as Maximon says, “Even at our most depressed, we can sometimes pause and laugh at ourselves.”
LVDLS premiered at the Mumbai Film Festival 2013 (MAMI) where it won the Young Critics Jury Award, travelled to the Dharamshala International Festival, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Greece and to the just-concluded International Film Festival of Kerala in Thiruvananthapuram. With more festivals to go in the circuit, Maximon and Sheena hope to generate enough finances for their next project — a magical realist film set in Japan. For now, they’re riding on the consecutive successes of LVDLS .
