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Roundtable discussion.

As the first technology capable of recording sign language, film was deliberately adopted by deaf communities as early as the 1910s. The exclusion caused by the introduction of sound in the late 1920s proved to be a catalyst for the growth of deaf audiences. Today, films by deaf filmmakers are flourishing thanks to the accessibility of affordable filming and editing equipment, and the distribution systems of disability and deaf film festivals and the internet.

Similar to other Eastern European countries, the deaf film movement flourished in Poland from the late 1960s onwards. In this presentation, Zdrodowska will present the dynamics of the Polish deaf film movement and how it correlates with political, social, and cultural changes in Poland and the Polish deaf community. In the socialist state, fostering a distinct deaf identity was discouraged, and social, political, and cultural activities were controlled by the state and its institutions. This influenced deaf filmmaking during communism and after its collapse. Another significant development was the adoption of the concept of Deaf culture, which reshaped Polish d/Deaf filmmaking in the 2010s.

Magdalena Zdrodowska is a Fall 2025 Widzinski Senior Fellow at CCPS and an associate professor of media studies and cultural studies at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. She works at the intersection of disability studies, deaf studies, history of technology, and film studies. She currently focuses on the relationship between cinema and deafness and approaches deaf-related technologies, deaf spectatorship, and deaf filmmaking as lenses through which to view the history of cinema as both art and technology. She serves as a chair of the Disability Studies in East Europe research platform and as a member of the executive committee of the Society for the History of Technology SHOT. Zdrodowska has translated L. Davies' Enforcing Normalcy into Polish (2022). She is currently working on her third book, Deaf Cinema. Her earlier monographs are Telewizja na pograniczach [Television on the Borderlands] (2013) and Telefon, kino i cyborgi [Telephone, Cinema and Cyborgs] (2021).

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