Language for the deaf

Name Me Lawand
Directed by Edward Lovelace
Certificate PG, 91 minutes
Released 7 July

Lawand, a young Iraqi boy, has been written off. He is different, he apparently doesn’t want to communicate with others. No one in his home country can help him. And that’s that.

Except, his parents don’t believe it. They are sure something can be done for their son, just not in Iraq. So, although all their friends and family are there, they leave the country believing it has nothing whatsoever to offer their son. And they move to the UK and settle in Derby.

Lawand’s issue is that he is completely deaf, and therefore can’t be taught in a school set up for those with functioning hearing. As such, he has no way of learning language from those who can hear. A different approach is required to enable him to develop basic language skills.

This documentary tells Lawand’s story from his arrival in the UK and enrolment at the Royal School for the Deaf Derby, taking us inside Lawand’s own struggles, from articulation of the component sounds that make up individual English words through to his learning of British Sign Language (BSL). He also persuades his family to take him on the march in support of the BSL Act, which recognises BSL as a language of the UK. It subsequently went through Parliament to become law in 2022.

We watch as Lawand’s older brother Rawa struggles to learn BSL so as to better communicate with his sibling. Their parents, meanwhile, want Lawand to speak vocally. However, Lawand doesn’t want to do this, and prefers to communicate in sign language.

At the same time, the film charts the family’s and the school’s fight against the Home Office as it attempts to instigate current, draconian, unjust, UK government immigration policy, which wants to send the family back to Iraq where all Lawand’s new-found freedoms would be taken away from him.

The documentary is more about Lawand’s health challenges and how he overcomes them to become language proficient, and thus live with dignity he would not otherwise enjoy, but it also adequately covers the devastating effect of current UK immigration policy on refugees.

Jeremy Clarke is a film critic. His website is jeremycprocessing.com

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Orthodox understanding

Holy Russia? Holy War? Why the Russian Church is backing Putin against Ukraine
Katherine Kelaidis
SPCK
£11.99
ISBN 978-0-281-08972-7

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Bob Dylan’s song, ‘With God on our side’, tells how Christian faith and ecclesiastical approval can legitimise the horrors of war. It tells how unsatisfactory the apparently simple categories of good/bad, right/wrong can be in understanding the motivation behind violent acts – one person’s evil terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. In this bewildering territory Katherine Kelaidis’s clearly written, passionate book is hugely enlightening and deeply challenging.

The book reveals how the narrative presented of the Ukraine conflict by western media is at best simplistic, but mostly woefully ignorant of the strands of history, geopolitics and religious identity that are woven into it. Repeatedly, Katherine states that we remain ignorant of the past and blinkered by our western mindset at our peril!…

Ian Fosten is book reviews editor for Reform

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In the steps of a saint

To The Island of Tides
Alistair Moffat
Canongate Books
£10.99
ISBN: 978-1-78689-634-6

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The historian Alistair Moffat has written much about the stories and landscape of his home, the Scottish Borders, and this book explores the life of one the region’s most famous sons: St Cuthbert. Along with his desire to re-trace the journey of the saint en route to a secular retreat on Lindisfarne, he is looking for a way to deal with not just his own mortality as his seventieth birthday approaches, but the death of his granddaughter too.

This is more than a simple travelogue, though. Spurred by the memories of a night under the stars in the Lindisfarne dunes decades before, Moffat’s thoughtful wanderings are thoroughly engaging as he looks both for signs of the land Cuthbert would have seen and still-passable routes. The pilgrimage itself presents plenty of chances to explore the early medieval fragments both through the physical echoes along the Tweed and the stories that have passed down generations….

Chris Fosten, Christ Church URC, Petts Wood

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This article was published in the July/August 2023 edition of Reform

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