The soon-to-debut-at-Slamdance short film “Talk,” written and directed by Jessica Perlman, is aimed at disrupting the experience of hearing-abled viewers. In it, a Deaf man enlists a translator to assist him in negotiating repairs for his broken HVAC system. But in part as a consequence of the language barrier between him and the repairman, tensions rise. The real breakdown, it seems is not the appliance—but instead the translation.
Clocking in at just two minutes, the short film is blunt, funny, and instructive. A part of its design is to eschew subtitles for the Deaf man’s signing, disrupting conventions but highlighting the challenges of cross-cultural conversation. The film is designed to engage hearing audiences in a conversation without their usual tools: they have to piece together nonverbal cues to understand the characters’ individual experiences. And for Deaf audiences, the film is aimed at making them feel seen and their lives represented, with both honesty and humor.
Jessica Perlman is a director and editor based in Los Angeles, with a portfolio spanning film, TV, and commercials. Her credits include the series I Think You Should Leave and Bojack Horseman as well as collaborations with brands such as BMW and Zeiss. Her first short film, “Breathing Underwater,” was showcased at festivals nationwide. She recently spoke with Film Obsessive Publisher J Paul Johnson about her film “Talk” and the personal experience that led to to making it. The transcript following the video has been edited for space and clarity.
Film Obsessive: Jessica, thank you for taking your time to speak with us today. Can I have you just do a brief synopsis of your film for our audience?
Jessica Perlman: So the short film that I created is called “Talk,” and it’s about a Deaf man who needs help from a translator to get his air conditioning fixed. So yeah, I don’t want to give too much away. It is a short film. It’s about two minutes. And there’s a bit of a punch at the end, so I kind of want to keep that a little bit of a mystery.
Fair enough, we’ll keep that a little bit of a mystery! But as I watch the film, one of the things I wondered about is if it were drawn from personal experience. Is it?
Definitely. So I grew up with Deaf parents. Both of my parents are Deaf. I have an uncle who’s Deaf as well, so I grew up in a very ASL heavy household, and me and my siblings were all hearing. So that put us in a really interesting position in, I guess, adult situations, like, for example, trying to interpret for a repairman. And yeah, you become an adult a lot faster and you kind of learn the world a lot faster. So that was something that I wanted to share with an audience in a way that people could relate to and not just say the words, but people could actually feel the moment in a conversation.
Wow, that must have been a heavy weight of responsibility on you as a child to have to do that translation.
Definitely. And it sort of it’s a heavy responsibility, but then it also challenges the parent-child dynamic where it’s like, Oh, you want to ground me, I mean, I helped you get a refrigerator. Like so we grew up in a really specific way that, you know, even to this day as an adult, I’m still, like, breaking down and understanding fully.
Is this the first work of art that you’ve wrought from that experience?
You know what? Yeah. Yeah, it is. I think I spent a long time trying to avoid it because it’s like, people are very interested in this fact about me so I kind of tried to avoid it, but this is really the first time I really embraced it and took it as a personal discovery and dive into my own identity.
That’s really interesting. So one way to do that would be with an epic multigenerational saga—you know, a cast of dozens, et cetera. And instead, you went, like, really micro specific, right? It takes place over just a few minutes, really, of conversation. Can I ask you just about the challenges of scripting, something that’s going to make its point that quickly?
I think probably the biggest challenge is because I decided not to add subtitles to the ASL part for a very intentional specific reason. And so reading it on the page is a little tough because it’s a very experiential film instead of writing it as a script—it was tough. I was going back and forth with some of colleagues and they were like, I don’t know. But then learning that what’s on the page isn’t necessarily what’s going to be experienced as a film. So that was definitely a learning experience, and knowing that a script in the script phase can be really plain and set out, but the magic sort of comes alive, I believe, in the editing and the acting as well.
Absolutely. And I’m going to come back to your perspective on ASL more broadly in a second. I also wanted to ask about the casting process for a film like this. There are three actors in the film. Are all of them ASL literate?
Our hard of hearing actor, Jacob (Schlotthauer), identifies as hard of hearing. He was the only person on set that was fluent in ASL. The main actress (Katrina Brianne) had taken some classes, so she was pretty warmed up in that. And then, of course, Doug the repairman (Todd Carroll) did not know ASL, which is perfect. So yeah, but our Deaf actor—I call him Deaf, Capital D-Deaf is a cultural belonging instead of necessarily a physical thing and not being able to hear. So he is hard of hearing, but his parents are Deaf. He went to the same Deaf university that my parents went to. So it was a cool little camaraderie onset.

Do you see your industry kind of moving in a good direction for its attention to concerns for the Deaf and for the hard of hearing? From your perspective, do you see the industry moving in the right direction or treading water here?
Yeah, I think it’s definitely moving in the right direction. As far as seeing Deaf people and people with disabilities in general on screen is a huge leap forward. I think what can be better improved is stories about people with disabilities from perspectives of people with disabilities. I would sincerely love to see a whole person with flaws and having mistakes and failing. Especially when it comes to Deaf people and sign language because it is a really enthralling language. Like to be able to see it, it’s really cool on film on screen. But it tends to take this benevolent position where I really want to show Deaf people in this fully human way.
Yeah, I understand that. So are there portrayals or specific films or narratives that you have a little bit in the back of your mind that maybe you want to chafe against a little bit, or maybe you thought were really good as representative works of art when you’re crafting “Talk”?
Certainly CODA was on the top of my mind. I watched that movie with my parents, and we had a good time watching it. It was very important, you know, for us to see together as a family. Um, I do want to see more I guess, the singing and the Deaf component together felt a little, I guess, Disney-ish in a way, which is appropriate. Like, I loved it, but I want to see the real gritty, the kind of not so bright side of people who are living their lives, you know?
Did you happen to see Sound of Metal?
I did see Sound of Metal, yeah, yeah. That one it is interesting. There’s certainly a huge delineation between someone who’s lost their hearing or someone who has no hearing versus Deaf culture and Deaf language and history and like, even like meeting Jacob, our Deaf actor, it was almost like we had this cultural connection, even though we’ve never met, you know? So he was on the football team that my dad was on the football team for Gallaudet University, and they have this, like, tradition where they shave their heads, you know? So they both did that, and that was really cool to be like, Oh, this is like my person. You know, like, we’re part of the same community.

That’s really cool. And, you know, I might just ask about the production itself. Did you shoot as quickly as the film looks like you shot?
Yeah, we shot in a day. We shot in a day, we shot in my friend’s mother-in-law’s house. So I was like, I like to say that it’s really short, and I would have loved to do more, but that’s all I could afford to put on screen at the moment.
Well, in a way, all films are all what the filmmaker can afford to put on screen at the moment!
Exactly! That’s true. That’s very true!
But do you have bigger things in mind, potentially?
Yeah, so I have a feature version of this story. It’s kind of similar to what I was speaking about having our Deaf character all these different facets of making mistakes or trying to become a better version of themselves with their daughter who is often placed in really adult situations, having to constantly translate or so she becomes this hyper independent child. And the dad that was relying on the hyper independent child, how did they move through life?
So that’s the feature version that I’m working on. I also have a short that I’m working on that is inspired by my dad, certainly my dad and my dad’s generation. In the early ’60s, sign language was seen as bad for Deaf kids, so my dad and my mom and a whole generation of Deaf youth were not given access to language. They were in a sense, stripped of their native language, which is sign language. And that certainly didn’t work. My dad was born in New York, and he grew up in one of the most interesting cities in the world and had no language to express himself. So that’s what this short is about.
Wow. That sounds fascinating. I hope I get a chance to see that in the future! And in the meantime, will you be at Slamdance with “Talk”?
I will, I will, I will.
That’s exciting. Will that be your first experience presenting your work at a festival or did you have your prior short films at festivals, as well?
I had some other films in festivals that were out of state, so I did not present them. So this will be my first time presenting. And we’ll be at Slamdance, so that’s really exciting.
Okay, that is exciting. Again, thank you so much for visiting us with us today, Jessica. I hope viewers get to see “Talk” at Slamdance, at other festivals, and maybe a bigger, more expanded version on our screens in the future. Thanks again, Jessica.
Thank you so much!