Name Me Lawand

Retool­ing a tem­plate used for The Pos­si­bil­i­ties are End­less, the won­der­ful and affir­ma­tive 2014 por­trait of Scot­tish new wave singer-song­writer, Edwyn Collins, film­mak­er Edward Lovelace turns his cam­era to teenage Kur­dish refugee Lawand for a sim­i­lar­ly-inclined inves­ti­ga­tion into a tri­umph against phys­i­o­log­i­cal and – in this instance – polit­i­cal adversity.

One might think that pro­vi­sions for deaf peo­ple would be boun­ti­ful across the globe, with sign lan­guage a cost-effec­tive resource to ensure wide­spread and sim­ple com­mu­ni­ca­tion between all. Not so in Iraq, where Lawand and his fam­i­ly are des­tined for pari­ah sta­tus as their then-five-year-old son is born with­out the abil­i­ty to hear. There is no state appa­ra­tus to help Lawand, and his par­ents are wor­ried of reprisals if they deign to rock this pre­car­i­ous polit­i­cal boat.

Name Me Lawand is a film doc­u­ment­ing the protagonist’s slow but steady adop­tion of BSL (British Sign Lan­guage) when the fam­i­ly move to the UK, specif­i­cal­ly Der­by, as asy­lum seek­ers. He is induct­ed into the Roy­al School for the Deaf, and his end­less­ly-empa­thet­ic tutor Sophie takes on the task of help­ing him, for the first time in his life, express his thoughts, feel­ings and mem­o­ries, as well as reflect with a mea­sure of casu­al dis­tance on his own tumul­tuous young life.

Lovelace is patient in the way he doc­u­ments the process of learn­ing a new lan­guage from scratch, and Lawand him­self makes for an inquis­i­tive young schol­ar. Yet aside from learn­ing this life-enhanc­ing tech­nique, the most mov­ing episodes are when he’s out­side with class­mates just idly con­vers­ing and see­ing if any­one is free for a kick­about. The film asks us, too, to con­sid­er our own lives and the things in it we might take for grant­ed: not just the abil­i­ty to freely com­mu­ni­cate with oth­ers, but cer­tain­ly for west­ern view­ers, rel­a­tive free­dom of thought and expression.

When Lawand becomes more con­fi­dent in his rec­ol­lec­tions, we are shown details of his hell­ish, year-long jour­ney from Iraq to the UK with time spent in des­ti­tu­tion, hold­ing camps and gen­er­al dire straights. This con­text adds to the size of his and his family’s achieve­ment, and the film does not try to whip up undue sen­ti­ment from this heart-rend­ing situation.

One thing that might ran­kle with UK view­ers is its depic­tion of this coun­try in which asy­lum seek­ers are not only wel­comed with open arms, but are giv­en an oppor­tu­ni­ty for cost­ly reha­bil­i­ta­tion – a sto­ry that doesn’t chime with the cur­rent state of xeno­pho­bic tabloid head­lines and rise in pig-head­ed iso­la­tion­ism and white nation­al­ism. And yet, the real Blighty does show its true colours lat­er on, when Lawand and his fam­i­ly, after all they’ve been through, are placed in the sight­lines for depor­ta­tion, and the film becomes a call for BSL to be recog­nised as an offi­cial language.

It’s a gen­tle, mov­ing work that tamps down the usu­al hys­te­ria and emo­tion-guid­ing musi­cal cues in an attempt to focus on the inte­ri­or process of reha­bil­i­ta­tion. It feels as if Lovelace is hon­ing this for­mal con­ceit, and hope­ful­ly we will see fur­ther iter­a­tions of it in the future.