The Tuba Thieves (2024)

2024-03-151h 32m

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.

Related Movies

312-thumbnail

Beyond Silence (1996)

Beyond Silence is about a family and a young girl’s coming of age story. This German film looks into the lives of the deaf and at a story about the love for music. A girl who has always had to translate speech into sign language for her deaf parents yet when her love for playing music grows strong she must decide to continue doing something she cannot share with her parents.

1234075-thumbnail

2bhk (2024)

2 flatmates unfold the layers of their relationship on a random Sunday afternoon after they encounter a power cut.

641-thumbnail

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

The drug-induced utopias of four Coney Island residents are shattered when their addictions run deep.

713-thumbnail

The Piano (1993)

When an arranged marriage brings Ada and her spirited daughter to the wilderness of nineteenth-century New Zealand, she finds herself locked in a battle of wills with both her controlling husband and a rugged frontiersman to whom she develops a forbidden attraction.

1235022-thumbnail

See You (2024)

After his suicide, a teen ghost contacts his classmate through sign language, revealing the queer love and pain they were never allowed to voice.

1432251-thumbnail

Quatro Linhas (2025)

644758-thumbnail

FUCK TV (2019)

After concluding the now-legendary public access TV series, The Pain Factory, Michael Nine embarked on a new and more subversive public access endeavor: a collaboration with Scott Arford called Fuck TV. Whereas The Pain Factory predominantly revolved around experimental music performances, Fuck TV was a comprehensive and experiential audio-visual presentation. Aired to a passive and unsuspecting audience on San Francisco’s public access channel from 1997 to 1998, each episode of Fuck TV was dedicated to a specific topic, combining video collage and cut-up techniques set to a harsh electronic soundtrack. The resultant overload of processed imagery and visceral sound was unlike anything presented on television before or since. EPISODES: Yule Bible, Cults, Riots, Animals, Executions, Static, Media, Haterella (edited version), Self Annihilation Live, Electricity.

457630-thumbnail

Vertigem Branca (2012)

What remains for me is to promote my own ruin. Aware of inevitable loneliness, the incarnation of cruelty.

1431023-thumbnail

MICROCYCLE (2025)

A surreal, low-budget odyssey through time, space, and toxic relationships.

1043325-thumbnail

The Dawn (2020)

In his Miami studio, built as a solar observatory, a famous painter lives alone, without a wife or children. His only obsession is to paint at dawn. But for some unknown reason, as he prepares to finish his last canvas, that morning the sun does not rise.

1233333-thumbnail

detours while speaking of monsters (2024)

Here, where even monsters are political, the topography has its own memory. It has the mythological blues. Meanwhile, old gods are upset with us, and I am upset with my father.

7345-thumbnail

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Ruthless silver miner, turned oil prospector, Daniel Plainview, moves to oil-rich California. Using his son to project a trustworthy, family-man image, Plainview cons local landowners into selling him their valuable properties for a pittance. However, local preacher Eli Sunday suspects Plainview's motives and intentions, starting a slow-burning feud that threatens both their lives.

9697-thumbnail

Lady in the Water (2006)

Apartment building superintendent Cleveland Heep rescues what he thinks is a young woman from the pool he maintains. When he discovers that she is actually a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the journey back to her home, he works with his tenants to protect his new friend from the creatures that are determined to keep her in our world.

1441016-thumbnail

ghost town. (2025)

A young man has an anxiety attack and in an attempt to feel something, he skips through Kanye West's 2018 release, ye, until he lands on Ghost Town.

1052592-thumbnail

Liminally, Yours (2022)

The last person on Earth revisits their memories as they wander a lonely world

1241389-thumbnail

The Garden Cadences (2024)

Jone is ready to fly. She finds herself at the beginning of something new, but before she moves on, there needs to be a closure. Jone is one of Mollies, the queer-feminist collective that had been living for a decade at a trailer park next to Ostkreuz, Berlin.

465605-thumbnail

I went away and forgot you. A while ago I remembered. I remembered I'd forgotten you. I was dreaming. (2016)

What appears at first glance to be a patterned floor of traditional Islamic tiles is in fact an intricate installation of hand dyed sand. In a light-filled room in an abandoned house, the artist steps into frame to sweep it away, breaking the illusion and destroying the image of traditional heritage.

8987-thumbnail

The River Wild (1994)

Gail and Tom Hartman are struggling to stay together and decide to take a white-water rafting holiday adventure in Montana for their son Roarke's 10th birthday, only to meet up with a pair of mysterious men whose desperation grows, turning their vacation into a nightmare.

1050523-thumbnail

Reflection (2023)

As she keeps watching old home movies isolated in her hotel room, the screen becomes a mirror from which she tries to see herself. Levels of subjectivity, narrative, and reality entwine into a surrealist fever dream of scopophilic cinéma pur. The final layer of meaning is all of us watching the film on the screen-mirror in the theatre.