The experience of motherhood changes the dynamics of the relationship with a partner, turns the world upside down, forces you to reevaluate your priorities and rearrange your life routine. After all, a new person appears on board. Is it complicated and difficult? Very. What if the mother has to deal with other challenges at the same time? “Sounds of Love” they take viewers to places where cinema is reluctant to go, and when they do, they do so in sentimental and maudlin, not to mention naive, tones. The Spanish film has its feet firmly on the ground.
Childbirth without a filter
Delivery room. Héctor is a wonderful, supportive, caring partner. He is with Angela, accompanies every contraction and every breath of his partner. But the midwives and doctors tell him to move away. Stand back. Childbirth is not a textbook process. An intervention is necessary, to guide Ángela and her body.
For every person it is a borderline, extreme situation that shapes the rest of their lives. For a woman, it is associated with exhaustion of the body, physical pain, the entire physiology of pregnancy and its final stage. For a couple who love each other and want a baby to come into the world, these hours are also full of emotions: excitement, fear, hope, questions, waiting, communication with the medical team. For a man, it is also a concern for the health of his loved ones: a woman and a child, and sympathy for the pain. Really a lot!
It’s not often that filmmakers allow viewers to participate in such an intimate moment. When they decide to do so, they usually limit themselves to a few simple shots, sometimes – the braver ones – showing a sweaty woman’s head, a hand tightly gripping a railing or another hand, a scream and a big smile. A crying baby is placed on its mother’s chest. Idyll!
Director and screenwriter Eva Libertad in “Sounds of Love” he doesn’t take the easy way. She drags out the birthing scene for quite a long time until it becomes physical. Difficult. Even more difficult and complicated because Angela cannot hear. He can read lips, but he’s giving birth. Her attention, due to the circumstances and circumstances, escapes elsewhere. Her contact with doctors and nurses is her husband. But the medics tell him to go to the back. He disappears from her sight. All these procedures and hospital behaviors are planned for hearing people. Not like the heroine. Is this the most beautiful moment of her life or the very center of hell?
Libertad conducts every second of the birth sequence with great sensitivity and in such a way that the audience literally touches these moments.
Sisterly pact. A script written by real fears
The script of “Sounds of Love”, which is now hitting our screens, was written by… life. It all started in Eva Libertad’s family home. Her sister – Miriam Garlowho played Angela, cannot hear. The idea for the film arose from the fears she had when she wanted to become a mother. “She shared with me her fears as a deaf woman. I realized that I had never thought about it before,” Libertad admitted in an interview with Wellington Almeida for Journey Into Cinema. – “What can a deaf woman who wants to become a mother in the world of hearing people be afraid of? I realized that apart from the doubts and uncertainties that all women struggle with, there are also others related to deafness. I asked Miriam to write down these fears. A few days later, she sent me a list that made a huge impression on me.”
The confessions between the sisters resulted in the creation of the short film “Deaf” (Libertad directed it with Nuria Muñoz, Garlo played the main role), which was invited to about 150 festivals in 2021. “Sounds of Love” deepens the themes discussed then. They are not a portrait of Miriam Garlo and her private life, but they draw from it, as well as from the lives of other deaf mothers.
“I must emphasize that the story presented in ‘The Sounds of Love’ is fiction, not my sister’s life,” the director noted in the quoted conversation. “I interviewed deaf mothers to find out what worries and concerns they had during pregnancy. Did they share them with their partners? How did motherhood affect their relationships with their partners and parents? What challenges did they face in communicating with their children? They also told me about their experiences during childbirth – in some cases they were much more difficult than what we show in the film,” she added.
In “The Sounds of Love” there is no rustling of paper at all. Rarely is cinema so veristic, it rarely shows the chaos of life with all its ups and downs. Angela is far from perfect. She tries, she loves, she wants to do well, but sometimes fear, disappointment, regret creep in, sometimes some kind of selfishness, maybe even jealousy for the child, and above all, confusion and the need to be understood and to provide her daughter with a good life. He is human. Not a figure. Not a symbol (of course, much of this is due to Miriam Garlo – we know that she is not pretending, we feel that what she presents to us is not only excellent acting skills, an artistic mask, but full commitment and probably her own experience, certainly awareness).
The limits of understanding
The question arises: to what extent can hearing people understand these dilemmas, which are probably unfamiliar to them? Is it even possible for worlds that use different communications to come closer? “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” said the famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
A world without sound (like the one without light, without the ability to move around it) is different from the world in which all these elements are present and possible, they are “obvious”. I don’t think anyone needs to be convinced of this. Sign language differs in its structure from verbal messages, and this is only one of the barriers to communication and understanding the labyrinth of Ángela’s thoughts and feelings.
The heroine herself succeeds in this feat in her relationship with Héctor – she cannot hear, but he can hear and he has learned sign language. They work together, creating a wonderful, compatible couple. Pregnancy brings disharmony. Ángela must go beyond the safety of her home nest and enter the “stranger’s territory”. The viewer must also enter a foreign territory. Eva Libertad requires effort from both sides. Both the heroine and the audience must leave their comfort zones and find themselves in unfamiliar communication and perception spaces. No discounted tariff. The director narrates the entire film in a tangle of verbal and sign language, until she reaches the point where the field is completely devoted to Angela’s “hearing”.
Empathy instead of sentimentality and fairy tales
It is not only authenticity and the task set before the viewer that distinguish “Sounds of Love” from cinema dealing with the lives of people – women! – deaf or, more broadly speaking, disabled. The most famous ones, such as “Coda”, “Children of a Lesser God”, “Sound of Metal”, “We understand each other without words”, even the Polish “Sonata”, despite many unquestionable artistic, production and cognitive values, fall into sentimentalism, sometimes even tenderness, sometimes they look for optimism “forcibly” and mainly serve to “encourage” (it looks a bit different in the documentary, but more about that another time).
“Sounds of Love” does not come to us with a lofty thesis, nor does it show pity for the “poor deaf woman”, but encourages empathy and openness to otherness. This is the first step towards introducing effective systemic solutions, such as more friendly procedures in a hospital or a pharmacy, which is theoretically supposed to serve deaf people, but the employee does not know sign language… Disability and sensory dysfunction can and probably will affect each of us and our loved ones at some stage. To look away and pretend not to hear it is naive. The question is whether the film will also be received equally well by people who are already struggling with challenges similar to Angela’s dilemmas?
“Sounds of Love” won, among others: Audience Award and the International Art Cinema Association (CICAE) Award at the Berlinale festival. The film was also nominated for the prestigious LUX European Audience Award. You can watch it in arthouse cinemas, hopefully also in DKF, because it encourages wise and necessary discussion. Especially in a country where there is still so much to do in this area and disabled people and their families must constantly be reminded that they are not worse, they just have slightly different needs.
7/10
“Sounds of Love” (Sorda), dir. Eva Libertad, Spain 2025, distributor: M2 Films, cinema premiere: January 9, 2026.