Dès juillet 1933, Adolf Hitler instaure une nouvelle loi sur la stérilisation forcée en matière d'hygiène raciale et d'anéantissement des handicapés. À partir de 1993, les sourds ayant vécu cette période racontent leur stérilisation faite sous la pression de leurs professeurs ou de membres de l'association des sourds nazis.
Président d'une société pharmaceutique, Walter Richmond est en voyage d'affaires à Amsterdam pour signer un important contrat. Il est accompagné de son épouse Cathryn et de leur petite fille de dix ans, Melissa. Muette, elle est toujours accompagnée d'une petite ardoise magique autour de son cou pour communiquer avec autrui. Alors qu'ils s'installent dans un palace pour y séjourner, ils remarquent que le bâtiment est en pleine effervescence car une rock star est de passage dans la capitale néerlandaise. Dans la confusion, Melissa se perd dans les couloirs de l'hôtel et assiste, par hasard, à un meurtre. La victime n'est d'autre que l'avocat d'un client hollandais de son père. Repérée par les assassins, Melissa s'enfuit et cache en ville auprès d'un SDF. Mais les meurtriers sont prêts à tout pour l'éliminer.
In 1821, Don Diego De La Vega (Anthony Hopkins) fights against the Spanish in the Mexican War of Independence as Zorro, a mysterious swordsman who defends the Mexican peasants and commoners of Las Californias. Don Rafael Montero (Stuart Wilson), the governor of the region, learns of De La Vega's alter ego, and attempts to arrest him. De La Vega's wife is killed during the scuffle. Montero imprisons De La Vega and takes his infant daughter, Eléna, as his own. Twenty years later Montero returns to California as a civilian, alongside Eléna (Catherine Zeta Jones), who has grown into a beautiful woman. Montero's reappearance coincides with De La Vega's escape from prison. He encounters a thief, Alejandro Murrieta (Antonio Banderas), who, as a child, once did Zorro a favor. De La Vega decides that fate has brought them together, and agrees to make Alejandro his protégé, grooming him to be the new Zorro. Murrieta agrees to undergo De La Vega's training regimen in order to be able to take revenge on Captain Harrison Love (Matt Letscher), Montero's right-hand man, who was responsible for killing Murrieta's brother, Joaquin.
The film tells the story of Lara, who grows up as the daughter of deaf parents. Lara herself is hearing and is fluent in sign language. Even as a young child, she serves as an interpreter for her parents in many situations. For example, she interprets at a credit negotiation at the bank, although not always completely truthfully.
Billy (Marina Zudina), an FX make up artist who does not have the physical ability to speak, is in Moscow working on a low budget slasher film directed by her sister's boyfriend Andy (Evan Richards). On one particular night Billy returns to the set to fetch a piece of equipment for the next day's shoot when she is accidentally locked in the studio. Being unable to speak but having the ability to communicate with her sister Karen (Fay Ripley), Billy makes several telephone calls but is interrupted when she discovers a small film crew working after hours to shoot a cheap porno film. Watching unseen Billy is amused until the performed sex becomes sadistic. When a masked actor pulls out a knife and stabs the actress (Olga Tolstetskaya), Billy reacts and is discovered. She flees pursued by the homicidal film crew.
The film follows the adventures of a group of friends through the eyes of Charles (Hugh Grant), a good-natured but socially awkward Briton, who is smitten with Carrie (Andie MacDowell), an American whom Charles repeatedly meets at four weddings and at a funeral.
A mute Scotswoman named Ada McGrath is sold by her father into marriage to a New Zealand frontiersman named Alisdair Stewart, bringing her young daughter Flora with her. The voice that the audience hears in the opening narration is "not her speaking voice, but her mind's voice". Ada has not spoken a word since she was six years old and no one, including herself, knows why. She expresses herself through her piano playing and through sign language, for which her daughter has served as the interpreter. Flora later dramatically tells two women in New Zealand that her mother has not spoken since the death of her husband who died as a result of being struck by lightning. Ada cares little for the mundane world, occupying herself for hours every day with the piano. Flora, it is later learned, is the product of a relationship with a teacher with whom Ada believed she could communicate through her mind, but who "became frightened and stopped listening," and thus left her.
À la suite d'une bagarre, le père d'Émilie est condamné à une peine de prison. Émilie est placée en famille d'accueil chez les Belin, alors que son petit frère Michel part dans une institution pour sourds.
This film focuses on the interrelationships between Deaf culture and language in France. Its overview encompasses a broad range of perspectives, contrasting the stories of a family who has been deaf and thriving for five generations with the story of a woman whose deafness was misunderstood, causing her to be confined for a time in an asylum for the insane. The documentary features hearing-impaired people of all ages and from all walks of life. With their profound deafness in common, the children and adults featured in this film communicate their dreams and thoughts through sign language. In one segment, Philibert focuses his camera on group of schoolchildren who are learning how to communicate in a world where they must read lips and speak words. The personal lives of some of the pupils and various adults are explored, including an actor, a sign-language teacher, and an engaged couple.
Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin) is a troubled young deaf woman working as a cleaner at a school for the deaf and hard of hearing in New England. An energetic new teacher, James Leeds (William Hurt), arrives at the school and encourages her to set aside her insular life by learning how to speak aloud.
Set in an indeterminate year of the 1840s, the film opens in a villa in Madrid, Spain, where Don Diego Vega (George Hamilton), the archetypal Spanish Don Juan, is in bed with a beautiful woman who, we learn shortly, is not his wife, but someone else's. The couple are caught by her husband, Garcia, who "is not in Barcelona", as they had previously thought. Diego, with considerable panache, fights Garcia and his five brothers with swords. During the fight, Diego's mute servant Paco (Donovan Scott) reads a letter (via gestures) from Diego's father requesting that Diego return to California [then a part of Mexico]. Diego and Paco escape by jumping from a high wall directly into a waiting carriage.
Le territoire est sous dictature militaire. Les fermiers voient leurs biens saisis et les villageois sont utilisés comme esclaves. Zorro est le seul à oser s'opposer à l'armée et il a juré de restaurer l'ordre et de libérer les opprimés. Cependant, pour la plupart, Zorro est un mythe.