{"id":12535,"date":"2026-08-02T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/?p=12535"},"modified":"2026-07-26T12:16:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T12:16:26","slug":"sound-is-only-part-of-listening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/sound-is-only-part-of-listening\/","title":{"rendered":"Sound Is Only Part of Listening"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>6 Minute, 54 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

MOVIE REVIEW
\nHeard<\/strong>
\n –  <\/strong> <\/strong> <\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n

Genre: <\/strong>Documentary
\nYear Released: <\/strong>2026
\nRuntime: <\/strong>1h 12m
\nDirector(s): <\/strong>Brian Ceci
\nWriter(s): <\/strong>Brian Ceci, Nigel Edwards, Jamila Pomeroy
\nCast: <\/strong>Brian Ceci, Kelsie Grazier, Laurie M. Landry, Ruzzelle Gasmen, Joseph Martin
\nWhere to Watch: <\/strong>now available on TELUS Optik TV and the TELUS TV+ app (BC\/AB)<\/p>\n

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RAVING REVIEW: <\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>Hearing loss can make someone responsible for solving communication problems that everyone else helped create. A missed word becomes their mistake. A conversation held over background noise becomes their failure to keep up. Asking someone to repeat themselves risks annoyance, while pretending to understand can leave them isolated inside a room full of people. HEARD examines that calculation through individuals who’ve spent much of their lives adjusting themselves to environments that rarely consider meeting them in the middle.<\/p>\n

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Director Brian Ceci begins with his own reluctance to identify openly as Hard of Hearing. His hearing loss has been present since childhood, but accepting it as part of his identity proves more complicated than acknowledging a diagnosis. Ceci learned how to blend into hearing spaces, concealing the effort required to follow conversations, and avoid drawing attention to the hearing aids that made him feel different. Those habits helped him move through the world while quietly separating him from people who might have understood what he was experiencing.<\/p>\n

Turning the camera toward himself requires an exposure his work as a cinematographer normally lets him avoid. Ceci is comfortable controlling an image from behind the lens. HEARD asks him to become the person inside it, speaking about the embarrassment, frustration, and uncertainty he once intentionally kept out of view. His anxiety gives the documentary a deep emotional honesty because he doesn’t present himself as someone who has resolved everything with himself before filming begins.<\/p>\n

The search leads him to Kelsie Grazier, Laurie M. Landry, Ruzzelle Gasmen, and Joseph Martin, each occupying a different place within the area between hearing and Deafness. Their experiences immediately challenge any assumption that hearing loss creates one way of communicating or understanding identity. Some use hearing aids or cochlear implants. Some speak, sign, or both. Others have formed a relationship with hearing loss that doesn’t depend on technology at all.<\/p>\n

HEARD respects those differences rather than searching for one person who can represent everyone. The film’s greatest strength comes from allowing its participants to disagree, change, and describe needs that don’t always align. Hearing loss becomes a spectrum of physical conditions, social experiences, communication choices, and cultural relationships. Two people may receive similar results during a hearing test while living with entirely different consequences. The people in between can struggle to find a community that reflects their lives. They may not identify with hearing culture, where communication is built around abilities they don’t always possess. They may also feel uncertain about claiming a place within Deaf culture, particularly without fluency in sign language or a history of participating in that community.<\/p>\n

Ceci’s film doesn’t treat this position as a space waiting to be corrected. It presents the in-between as an identity with its own challenges, possibilities, and variety. The uncertainty comes less from failing to fit one category than from living in a society that insists the categories should be enough.<\/p>\n

The conversations become most revealing when the participants discuss the labor hidden behind ordinary interactions. Listening isn’t passive when someone must read lips, study facial expressions, fill gaps through context, and constantly decide whether requesting clarification is worth interrupting the conversation. A busy restaurant, group discussion, or poorly arranged room can turn communication into a series of guesses. Hearing people may leave the same event tired from socializing. Someone with hearing loss may leave exhausted from trying to reconstruct everything that was said. HEARD communicates that difference without presenting its subjects as delicate or helpless. Their adaptations demonstrate skill, patience, and awareness, although resilience doesn’t excuse the conditions that demand so much of them.<\/p>\n

The documentary uses sound and image to move part of that experience beyond verbal interpretation. Ceci understands that a film about hearing loss can’t rely solely on interviews describing what sounds are missing. Shifts in clarity, competing noises, visual attention, and moments of incomplete information place the audience closer to the uncertainty of following a conversation without receiving every word. These techniques are most successful when they remain grounded in a participant’s perspective. The film isn’t trying to simulate a universal version of hearing loss, which would contradict everything its subjects explain. It offers brief sensory approximations that encourage hearing viewers to recognize how much they assume about communication.<\/p>\n

Ceci’s willingness to include lighter moments restores parts of himself that had been muted by years of self-consciousness. His journey isn’t presented as a transition from shame to confidence. It involves recognizing that the child who wore hearing aids wasn’t defined solely by insecurity, even if later memories began arranging childhood around that feeling.<\/p>\n

HEARD isn’t organized around a cure to the distance between others' understanding, technological breakthrough, or inspiration alone. Hearing aids and cochlear implants can be valuable, frustrating, necessary, unwanted, or all of those things depending on the person and situation. Devices change access to sound; they don’t automatically resolve questions of belonging. That refusal to offer an answer extends to Ceci’s search for community. Meeting people with related experiences gives him language and recognition he lacked, but the documentary doesn’t pretend one group conversation settles his identity forever. He remains a person learning where he belongs and what he wants that belonging to mean.<\/p>\n

The difference is that he no longer has to work through those questions alone. Community doesn’t require identical hearing levels, communication methods, or cultural backgrounds. It begins with the relief of not having to explain every part of an experience before someone recognizes it. HEARD gives that recognition to people who rarely find themselves represented with this much specificity. It also asks hearing viewers to reconsider communication as a shared responsibility. Speaking clearly, facing someone, reducing background noise, providing captions, and responding patiently aren’t extraordinary acts of generosity. They’re simple ways of making sure participation doesn’t depend on one person performing all the work.<\/p>\n

Ceci’s documentary is warm without softening the isolation at its core. Its participants have built careers, relationships, and creative lives while navigating a society designed around hearing. Their success doesn’t prove the barriers were insignificant. It proves how often they were expected to manage those barriers on their own.<\/p>\n

The film’s title carries more than one meaning. These individuals want access to sound, language, and conversation on their own terms. They also want their experiences acknowledged without being simplified into inspiration or loss. HEARD allows them to define themselves, and its most moving achievement is making that act feel less like a declaration than the beginning of an overdue conversation.<\/p>\n

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[photo courtesy of RUCKUS MACHINE PICTURES, TELUS OPTIK TV, TELUS ORIGINALS]<\/em><\/p>\n

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MOVIE REVIEW Heard –      Genre: Documentary Year Released: 2026 Runtime: 1h 12m Director(s): Brian Ceci Writer(s): Brian Ceci, Nigel Edwards, Jamila Pomeroy Cast: Brian Ceci, Kelsie Grazier, Laurie M. Landry, Ruzzelle Gasmen, Joseph Martin Where to Watch: now available on TELUS Optik TV and the TELUS TV+ app (BC\/AB) RAVING REVIEW: Hearing loss can make someone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12536,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/img\/0367\/0367481.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t