Khushi Jain shows love for Garry Keane's intimate documentary.
‘Language is skin’, wrote Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist and semiotician, in his 1977 book A Lover’s Discourse. He continued, ‘I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words’. It is in between these convoluted knots of words and bodies that A Quiet Love resides.
Acclaimed Irish documentarian Garry Keane’s third project is the third collaboration with producers Anne Heffernan and Seán Herlihy, after These Walls Could Talk (2015) and Deafening (2017). A Quiet Love is a cinematic feature recounting the lives of three deaf couples exclusively through Irish Sign Language (ISL). The film’s narrative creates an immersive experience of deafness. This sense of inclusivity and sensitivity is omnipresent in every aspect of the project, from its creative decisions to its crew, which employed 28 members of the deaf community in a variety of capacities. For this commitment, A Quiet Love was awarded the Global Production Award at Cannes in 2025. The film has had a successful festival run, from opening Singapore’s first ever documentary festival to winning the Audience Choice Award at the San Diego International Film Festival, to a sold-out Irish premiere at the Cork International Film Festival.
The stories in A Quiet Love are told through the movement of hands, gazes and body language. Sound takes a back seat as deaf octogenarians John and Agnes remember falling in love during the Troubles. Keane recreates a fictionalised version of their younger years to support their recitations. While deafness created new problems and obstacles for the couple, it also became a means of coming together: there was only one deaf school in the area. So John, a Catholic, and Agnes, a Protestant, studied alongside one another. Societal prejudice also affected the deaf lesbian couple Michelle and Kathy. When the two fell in love, same-sex marriage was illegal in Ireland. Living in the UK now, they have a wonderful family with two little girls, one hearing and one deaf. The third couple of the film is Seán and Deyanna, parents to a little boy. Seán is deaf while Deyanna is hearing, and both are fiercely devoted to and supportive of each other. Seán’s deafness does not impact his relationship but is a technical obstacle in his dream of becoming a professional boxer, which the film explores with great empathy.
Keane manages to put together an emotional scrapbook of these three stories. The spectrum of SFX, robotic music, electronic voices heard through cochlear implants, faint noises of partial deafness and complete silence when hearing aids are taken off are effectively designed by Brendan Rehill. There is no use of theatrics or hyperbolic drama; rather the film shows that these people overcome religious divide, homophobia, illness, substance abuse and fertility problems.
A Quiet Love opens with a warm moment between John and Agnes. They sit side by side on a sofa and Agnes softly brushes John’s sweater, trying to get a piece of lint off. Meanwhile, John peacefully looks at the camera, an ordinary and comfortable interaction. Without talking or listening, just through this physical contact, the two silently show their enduring affection for each other. Keane’s film is full of this kind of tactility, since gestures are words in these love stories. And the film’s making too is home to a remarkable quietness.
A Quiet Love is in cinemas now.
