The Tuba Thieves offers interactive tools beyond traditional movie databases:
A creative nonfiction documentary exploring targeted tuba robberies through a d/Deaf cinematic lens, utilizing a telephone game structure to examine sound, miscommunication, and auditory perception.
Documentary, Drama · 8/10 · 92 min · 2024
A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.
