Stutterer
Stutterer by Benjamin Cleary won the 2016 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film and is now available to view online for free courtesy of the New Yorker.
It’s a thirteen-minute movie about a young London typographer named Greenwood (Matthew Needham). Greenwood stutters, to the extent that verbal conversation is difficult. When he tries to resolve an issue with a service representative over the phone, he can’t get the words out; the operator, gruff and impatient, hangs up. (For surliness, she rivals the operator in the old Yaz song.) When a woman approaches Greenwood on the street, he uses sign language to avoid talking. But in his thoughts, which we hear, he does not stutter.
Great little film…my heart broke three separate times watching it. Here’s an alternate video if you can’t view the embed at the top of the page.
Comments 1
I had a co-worker who was a stutterer. They lived outside the US and their first language was not English, but their emails were always in flawless, idiomatic, clear, and well written English. Do not confuse difficulty speaking with difficulty communicating.
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