Directed by Ned Castle and Matt Day, All You Hear is Noise follows three Special Olympics athletes—Trent, Chris, and Melanie—through their training for competition in the United Arab Emirates, their relationships with their friends, families, and fellow athletes, and the aftermath as they return to the United States. Each athlete grapples with different issues both connected to and outside of their disability—from the skepticism of family members and friends and to the combination of support and condescension of the abled athletic world. But All You Hear is Noise allows the three to speak for themselves, falling neither into condescension nor turning into an “uplifting” story about overcoming disability. Rather, it shows three people out of thousands who are who they are because of their disability, not in spite of it.
All You Hear is Noise is structured like a typical sports documentary, but where it could easily fall into the traps of mining for maudlin sentiment or making an argument for the disabled athletes “overcoming” their disabilities, it instead opts for sharper, more humanistic reality. It depicts both the spectacular talents of its subjects while also showing their isolation in a world built upon ableism that either ignores, marginalizes, or denigrates those who do not fit into a single acceptable space. Trent, Chris, and Melanie all have the basic demand underlying their stories: to be treated without bias and with the same respect afforded to any Olympic athlete.
The film’s depiction of the aftermath of the Special Olympics in the UAE is perhaps most poignant, as all three attempt to reacclimate to their home lives and experience marginalization because they are Special Olympic athletes. Chris is told to conceal his autism diagnosis from the Navy in order to be admitted to bootcamp. Despite her work to overcome her social anxiety in the UAE, Melanie struggles to accept her mother’s decision to uproot them from Wyoming. Trent, successful as he is as an athlete, faces the fact his family and coworkers treat him with condescension.
The film cannily highlights the way in which its disabled athletes feel they have to excel in order to prove themselves to the rest of the world. That struggle is more of an indictment of the abled world than anything. Disability is not the problem; the problem is a world constructed around a very narrow notion of what it means to be, as Trent says, “normal,” putting up obstacles both legal and social to the disabled.
The film’s title comes from Chris’s comment, in which he attempts to describe the sensation of being both accepted because of his talents yet treated as an outsider because of his disability. It is this honesty, both within the film and from the athletes, that makes All You Hear is Noise a more serious, moving documentary than if it had been simply another tale of disability and diversity. I was left feeling more angry than anything else, as the film forces the abled among us to interrogate the way we treat the disabled, our lack of acceptance, and how we still fail to fully challenge the rules of a world that marginalizes people for difference.
All You Hear is Noise is available to stream on Tribeca At Home.