I omitted a rather important detail from my entry yesterday which I decided warrants it’s own post. When we went into the screening room, I noticed that the film had subtitles. At first this struck me as pretty strange: the film was in English, so there was no reason for them. I initially thought they would just be a distraction. But then my brain kicked in: The Barbican obviously wanted the film to be accessible to everyone, including Deaf and hard of hearing people. Why shouldn’t the film have subtitles? In fact, when I came to think about it, why shouldn’t film screenings in general have subtitles? After all, it’s pretty unfair on people who need subtitles to watch films to only be able to go to certain, very limited, screenings. If subtitles distract or bother the rest of us, then surely it would be up to us to get used to them; that would be preferable than continuing to exclude Deaf people from cinemas.