Visible Cinema

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Visible Cinema

Visible Cinema is GFT's deaf and hard of hearing-friendly film programme. Films shown throughout the year will have descriptive subtitles (captions) followed by a post-film discussion with integrated British Sign Language (BSL) and live captions (speech-to-text).

Watch our Visible Cinema trailer below to find out more.

Showtimes

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What can I expect from Visible Cinema?

A deaf-friendly and hard of hearing-friendly film and social event.
Front of House staff and volunteers are BSL and deaf-awareness trained.
A captioned or subtitled film screening.
After the film there is a social post-film chat.
A ticket costs £6.50 per person.
Accessible seating/enhanced audio headsets are available on request prior or at time of booking. Contact details are in the next section.
A plain English synopsis of the film and the full range of captioned films happening at GFT are available on the night.
In addition, on a quarterly basis, we host Visible Cinema: RCS Curates in partnership with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's BA Performance in BSL and English students. At these events you will experience deaf-led or deaf interest films curated by the students plus facilitated conversation designed to entertain and support greater understanding of deaf culture.

What is British Sign Language (BSL)?

Most deaf people who use sign language in the UK speak their regional variation of British Sign Language (BSL) as their first language. BSL is a visual-gestural language with a distinctive grammar using handshapes, facial expressions, gestures and body language to convey meaning. It has its own grammar and is structured in a completely different way from English. The deaf community see themselves as people within a linguistic minority not with a disability.

Approximately, 1 in 5 people speak British Sign Language (BSL). For many hearing people, they may never have met a deaf person let alone see someone speak BSL.

Scotland sharpened its vision in October 2015 when The Scottish Parliament passed the BSL (Scotland) Act making BSL a recognised language, followed by the UK's first BSL National Plan 2017-2023.

Ahead of this landmark change, in March 2015, GFT launched Visible Cinema: the first initiative of its kind in Scotland which champions cinema accessibility. As priority, this year-round programme offers deaf BSL speaking people and people with variable hearing loss the opportunity to enjoy a cinema experience at an affordable cost in a relaxed and socially inclusive environment. Everyone is welcome.

Our Front of House staff and volunteers are BSL and deaf awareness trained.

This work is supported with funds from Glasgow City Council Communities Fund. Thank you to signhealth.org.uk and rnid.org.uk.

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'This programme was brilliant. Such high quality which is what we need to see more of coming from Deaf professionals. Please more of this!'

Deaf audience member who attended Visible Cinema at Glasgow Film Festival 2019

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What are captions?

Captioning is a service for people who are deaf and people experiencing varying degrees of hearing loss who require dialogue and off-screen sounds to be subtitled on the screen.

This service provides text in time with the audio from a film and this is displayed at the bottom of the cinema screen. Captions are of a higher quality than subtitles as captions also detail all non-dialogue audio such as '(sighs)', '(singing)' or '(doorbell rings)'.

Not all titles will be made available with a captioned format due to the financial capacity of distributors to write, record and produce a separate disc which then can be played and projected at the same time as the film print.

GFT checks if a captioned format is available for every film programmed. If this format is available to us, then captioned screenings of the film are programmed.

What is live captioning?

Live captioning or speech-to-text, is live text of dialogue voiced in the room. At GFT all Visible Cinema events have live captioning provided to ensure that each event introduction and post-film discussion is accessible. The text appears on the cinema screen, in large font and can be seen comfortably from anywhere in the auditorium.

Contact us

If you have any queries please contact GFT either by email: access@glasgowfilm.org, by phone: 0141 332 6535 or BSL users can contact GFT via contactSCOTLAND-BSL, the on-line British Sign Language interpreting video relay service. Find out more at www.contactscotland-bsl.org

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