Groundbreaking Jesus film for deaf audiences debuts as director hails: ‘No barrier to communication’

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A new film out this week depicting the life of Jesus aims to reach an audience its director says has long been overlooked.

"JESUS: a Deaf Missions film," will be the first of its kind made up of a deaf cast using American Sign Language to reach a deaf audience with the Gospel story, its filmmaker says. The film will be released in theaters on June 20.

"This is the first feature film about Jesus in sign language," director Joseph D. Josselyn told Fox News Digital about the unique project. "What makes it special for a Deaf audience, is there is no barrier to communication. A Deaf audience can enjoy the film in their full heart language, expressed through a Deaf cast. A Deaf audience can watch without relying on captions like other hearing films. We can watch the full screen without having to look back and forth between actions and captions."

"As a Deaf director with Deaf cinematographers, we carefully frame actors to ensure signs are still visible and understandable while still being creative with shots," he continued.

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"JESUS: a Deaf Missions film," uses Deaf actors to bring the story of Jesus to life from a Deaf perspective for a Deaf audience, the movie synopsis says. (Deaf Missions)

Josselyn was inspired to make this film because he is deaf himself and understood the need for a different presentation of the Gospel story for this audience.

"When I was young, my family and I always watched 'Jesus of Nazareth.' Being a Deaf person, I had to look back and forth between the English captions and the action of the film. I started to think – what if Jesus was using sign language and I didn't have to read what He was saying," Josselyn said. "That was my small seed of thought that has been with me since, but did not grow until I joined Deaf Missions in 2006. We had some discussion about making a film on the life of Christ, and at that time I did not feel confident we had the right resources to make it happen."

Josselyn is the Chief Media Officer and Producer at Deaf Missions, an organization committed to spreading the Gospel in ASL to deaf people worldwide. 

After adapting the biblical story of Job into a film in 2018 for deaf audiences, his organization completed a 38-year project translating the entire Bible into ASL in 2020. Making a film about Jesus seemed like the most natural step, he said.

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"JESUS: a Deaf Missions film" director, Joseph D. Josselyn, spoke with Fox News Digital about the groundbreaking film. (Deaf Missions)

"We discussed the next big project, and it was clearly the film JESUS," the director said.

While his primary goal was to share the story of Jesus, he also wanted to showcase how a high-quality film could be made for this audience.

"In this mainstream world, we get excited when we see Deaf performers in a film with hearing performers, such Marvel’s ‘Eternals’ and the film ‘CODA.’ We still want to see more of that. We also want to have our own Deaf cinema where everyone signs and how we express our craft as Deaf artists is clearly shown through our Deaf cinema," he said.

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Josselyn said the film has English subtitles and a musical score for hearing audiences to enjoy as well.

"We hope the Deaf audience will gain a better understanding of who Jesus is, and we hope the hearing audience will better understand our Deaf culture," he added.