Compensation
Year: 1999
Country: United States
Type: Feature
Form: Narrative
A rare, tender portrait of deaf African American women, this film explores the complexities of crip love at both ends of the twentieth century. In dual performances, Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks play an educated dressmaker and an illiterate migrant in 1910s Chicago, and a resilient graphic artist and an endearing librarian living in the same city eight decades later.
Through archival imagery, lyrical editing, and a rich musical score, Zeinabu irene Davis explores interabled romance, community tensions, and the experience of being multiply disabled, deftly intertwining the two couple’s stories in ways both poignant and profound.
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