‘Special’, ‘place’, and ‘need’ are the first three words Deaf Kurdish schoolboy Lawand Hamad Amin says in Edward Lovelace’s crisp and touching documentary Name Me Lawand.
As the audience is introduced to his world, the earthslowly spins in space as the young refugee – whose deportation battle made headlines in late 2016 amid his rapid progress in learning British Sign Language – struggles to find his place in it.
Born profoundly deaf and having no deaf friends in Iraq, five-year-old Lawand felt lost as he tried to keep quiet in the back of a lorry with his family and understand his treacherous journey to the UK back in 2016.
After enrolling at the Royal School for the Deaf in Derby that year, he again found himself experiencing a familiar sense of confusion while settling into a new community.
‘I had a very nice house in Iraq and I didn’t really know what was going on,’ Lawand tells Metro.co.uk over FaceTime, ‘and when we were at the house in Derby, the feelings that I had were very similar, but it was a big shock at both times.’
Inside Lawand there was, as writer and director Edward Lovelace (co-director of the 2012 Katy Perry documentary Part of Me) explains, a vast, huge landscape full of memories, ideas and wants for the future. He was just trying to find a way to communicate that to others.
It was seeing photos of Lawand and his older brother Rawa, 14, which drew Edward to making the film – they were siblings who had the same journey to the UK, but unable to share their own experiences with one another.
‘The idea of a documentary process possibly giving them a platform to communicate together, for the family to understand each other in a new way – that was inspiring to me,’ Edward explains.
‘The main thing was feeling like a refugee story could be told through a kid’s perspective in a really direct and human way. I thought that would bring some greater truth and clarity to the whole refugee crisis, in a way that might open people’s perspectives about such a broad and complex subject.’
Space is at the heart of Lawand’s sense of belonging in the film, explains Edward. If he is not dreaming of being on another planet where he doesn’t feel different to everyone else, he’s grounded in the real world with his search for ‘home’ – in all its forms.
‘When people say, “oh, I feel at home here”, they’re not talking necessarily about their house,’ adds the director. ‘They’re talking about a feeling they get by being with certain people in a certain area.
‘I think Lawand felt, “if I landed on another planet, what I’d be looking for is just friendship and connection”,’ he continues.
‘Something that seems so unthinkable for Lawand to get, is what most other people would take for granted – connection and friendship.’
One such connection explored in the film is Lawand’s bond with Sophie Stone, the Deaf actress best known for roles in Casualty and Doctor Who. When she’s not performing, she also works as a support teacher.
With the help of a bright yellow balloon, she shows Lawand the joy of music and drumming. Referencing an iconic scene from The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves seems to defy gravity as he falls back in slow motion and then comes back up, she introduces him to a form of atmospheric ‘sign-acting’ and performance art known as Visual Vernacular or VV for short.
‘[Neo] nearly falls but comes back up, ready to fight back,’ Sophie explains to him. ‘He feels nothing.’
It speaks to Lawand’s resilience amid isolation and confusion over settling in the UK. After an initial numbness to the world around him, he becomes increasingly inquisitive as the film progresses. As for VV, he plans to look into it and try to have a go (though he tells Metro that he later decided to give it up as no one else at his school was doing it as well).
‘Just watching Lawand learn language… You could tell there was his personality inside of him trying to get out,’ says Edward. ‘You could see that he got out a lot of his frustrations and once they were out, he just became mega happy. From then on, you could really see him mastering humour and banter.’
Lawand’s playfulness is immediately apparent during his call with Metro. He beams while holding his seven-month-old baby brother Rewan, chats about BMWs, and is not afraid to be a bit upfront about what it’s been like teaching Rawa sign language.
‘[It’s] quite annoying,’ Lawand, who is now 12, says frankly, ‘because I’ve had to teach him. Over time, though, I do know that his signing’s really improved. It’s really hard to communicate with him, but he does try.’
A conversation between the two of them is filmed at the top of the stairway in their Derby home. Lawand signs enthusiastically about their visit to the beach in Liverpool, a place which is good for swimming, his brother notes.
Waves crash and bubble as Lawand tells Rawa how wishes he knew how to float in the water, a stillness which likely speaks to the youngster’s search for inner peace, and stability amid the ongoing threat of deportation from the Home Office.
Perhaps, too, the flow of such a rich, visual language like BSL. Towards the end of the almost 90-minute documentary, which brings us closer to the present day, Lawand heads to London to attend last year’s rally for a British Sign Language Act, legislation which – in April 2022 – would finally recognise the language as the one used by Deaf people in England, Scotland and Wales.
‘It was really a nervous feeling, seeing all the Deaf people around me,’ he admits. ‘It was just a bit overwhelming, to see lots and lots of Deaf people at one time around you, you’re like, “wow”.’
The flood of language and community is not unique to the young boy at the centre of the documentary, either. Over the four years spent filming Lawand’s mastering of British Sign Language, Edward too was learning BSL in order to get the most out of his subject.
‘I think myself – like Lawand, like anyone who learns sign – I just fell in love with the language,’ the director explains. ‘It’s so visual, it’s so expressive, that for me, going on this journey myself about learning this new language, that language giving me access to not just Lawand, but to understand his friends, his school, or this whole beautiful world that surrounded him in Derby. That was a joy for me.’
It’s the same insight Edward wants viewers to experience when they watch the documentary in cinemas.
‘I want the audience to not look at Lawand and have an opinion about what they might think about this kid, but rather live the experience that he’s lived and then they would have a truer understanding of what he’s been through,’ he says.
‘The empathy, I think, will be as big as possible, because hopefully the audience have stepped into his shoes.’
Naturally, sound plays a part in conveying Lawand’s journey and interactions with the world around him. Speech is muffled at points, and Sam Arnold – a Deaf assistant director who, like Lawand, is a cochlear implant user – helped shape the documentary’s engaging use of sound.
‘We’re less interested in what the audience can hear, but instead what the sound design would make the audience feel,’ says Edward. ‘Sam was obviously saying, at times, audio can create a sense of calm, what you’re hearing can create a sense of calm. It can create a sense of anxiety.
‘It was just all about what is the emotional feeling? What does it feel like to sit in a class and what does it feel like to go through those things, basically.’
Edward’s interview with Metro comes a day after MPs debated the House of Lords’ amendments to the Illegal Migration Bill, the controversial policy which seeks to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Peers wanted changes to prevent ministers breaching international conventions, exempt victims of modern slavery, and block LGBTQ+ individuals from being deported to a list of named countries – all of which were ultimately rejected.
Then, after a period of back-and-forth between the Commons and the Lords, the Bill became law on Thursday 20 July, 2023.
While immigration remains a divisive and hostile a topic as ever, Edward says that he hopes his film brings the human side of the issue to the fore.
‘I really feel like someone that might have a certain opinion about refugees coming into their country could watch this film, and actually, it might make them realise that at the heart of all these big, big issues, there’s just humans,’ he says.
‘Lawand and his brother are just kids who want to play football and just hang out with their friends – and know that they can know they’re going to be able to see their friends tomorrow.
‘I would say anyone that has an opinion about refugees coming to the UK, if they hung out with Lawand and his family, would understand why this family needs to be in the UK. They would be shocked about what they went through for seven years here just waiting for their decision.’
However, Lawand’s family are one of the lucky ones, Edward points out. ‘There’s loads who have been here 20 years and still don’t have answers, basically,’ he says.
A week after attending the BSL rally in Trafalgar Square, the same day it passed its final stage in the House of Commons, a court granted Lawand’s application for asylum in the UK, seven years after he first arrived.
His exceptional progress in learning sign language was cited by the judge as one of the reasons the family should stay in the UK.
The ‘special place’ Lawand’s younger self was looking for was finally looking a lot more concrete.
‘It meant that we didn’t have to fly back to Iraq,’ he says. “I didn’t have to meet any new people. I could just be here with people that I knew, that I felt comfortable with.
‘It made me feel really happy.’
Name Me Lawand is in cinemas now and on BFI Player from 21 August. For more information click here.
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