 '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. Lawandwas born profoundly deaf and had no deaf friends in Iraq (Picture:BFI) Director Edward Lovelace says that Lawand and his older brother Rawa, 14, were siblings who had the same journey to the UK, but unable to share their own experiences with one another. (Picture: BFI) 'The idea of a documentary process possibly giving them a platform to communicate together,){kind=link}
NEWS… BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT
‘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.