A seed was planted in Michael Cestaro’s mind when he heard Jeffrey Mansfield, a 2021 fellow at Provincetown’s Twenty Summers, deliver a lecture at the Hawthorne Barn. Mansfield, an architect who is deaf, spoke about the relationships between deafness, the design of public spaces, power, and inclusiveness. The seed was not in Mansfield’s sweeping theories but in a passing reference he made to a historical deaf community on Martha’s Vineyard.
“I live in Eastham, and I’d never heard of this,” says Cestaro. “I thought, ‘There’s something here.’ ” After the lecture, Cestaro told Mansfield, “I don’t know what it is, but you and I are going to make something in the future.”
Nearly four years later, Cestaro has completed a short film, Signs From the Mainland, a meditation on the Vineyard’s deaf community, with Mansfield as its central character and “emotional guide.” The film will have its first public viewing on March 29 as part of a program of documentary shorts at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival. It was produced by Twenty Summers and Cecilia Parker.
The film is suffused with a sense of longing. In the opening scene, Mansfield signs, “Every one of us is so busy that we just prioritize what’s in front of us. That sense of individualism … is becoming a bigger part of who we are as a society.”
In the film, Mansfield seems to be searching for something. The camera follows him traversing the island’s scenic roads, beaches, docks, and trails. Cestaro filmed in the winter; his wide-angle shots and drone footage of the coastal landscape are seductive and beautiful but also empty.
It becomes clear that Mansfield is yearning for a sort of paradise that Martha’s Vineyard might have at one time represented. He recalls feeling frustrated as the only deaf student at his college and coming upon a book about the Vineyard titled Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language.
“It was enthralling,” he signs. “It was about Martha’s Vineyard’s history of hereditary deafness and sign language on the island and the idea that everyone could communicate with each other without any barriers. It seemed almost like a utopia.”
The truth about the island’s deaf community is more complex, as we learn from Bow Van Riper, research librarian at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. There’s ample evidence that the island had a significant deaf population in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Chilmark, one of every 24 people was recorded as deaf in 1854, when the island’s deaf population peaked; in Squibnocket, an enclave in Chilmark, one of every four people was deaf.
Though Van Riper says there is no evidence that everyone on the island knew sign language, he confirms that the coexistence of spoken and sign language in everyday life was a fact, although its extent is an open question.
“I’m a big fan of the myths and stories about the old days that capture a deeper truth,” says Van Riper. “The central message of that myth is deeply and profoundly true. There was in Chilmark a belief that deafness was not otherness, that deafness was not a disability.”
The peak of the island’s deaf community preceded the establishment of American Sign Language (ASL), and it had its own language, Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language. The last person born into the island’s sign-language tradition died in 1952. After the American School for the Deaf opened in Hartford in 1817, many of the island’s deaf children enrolled there.
In the film, Jeffrey Bravin, executive director of the school, speculates that because the children who came from the Vineyard had that language, they were more literate than those who grew up elsewhere. As deaf people left the island, the community shrank, and its language was integrated into ASL. The film includes archival footage of Eric Cottle, a Vineyard old-timer who died in 2010, relating his memories of signing. He was not hard of hearing, but being able to sign was handy for cheating at cards, he says.
Cestaro says he didn’t want to make a purely historical documentary. “I don’t like to explain in films,” he says. “I want people to understand the emotional experience and create empathy and understanding.”
Cestaro composed the music for the film and also did the sound design. Though the music is an important emotional element, alternating segments of sound and silence reflect Cestaro’s anticipation of an audience of both hearing and deaf people. It’s often silent when people are signing. “I’ve always been intrigued by the use of silence in films,” he says. Subtitles help viewers who do not understand ASL follow the narrative.
Music was Cestaro’s way into film. Growing up in Eastham with four older brothers, he studied piano and violin. When his brothers left home, he picked up their instruments. While studying music production at Berklee College in Boston, he was asked to score a short student film and loved it. He realized that listening to music had always been a cinematic experience for him. “I see scenes and landscapes when I listen to music,” he says.
After graduating, he made marketing videos. It didn’t provide the creative outlet he wanted, but it was training for his later filmmaking. In 2016, he returned to Eastham and made a short film — his first — about the ceramicist Steve Kemp. He followed that with two others, portraits of people of color living on the Cape.
In his films, he looks at “the extraordinary nature of the lives of normal people,” he says. And he’s especially interested in the lives of people in the community where he grew up. “I could tell stories about people on the Cape for the rest of my life. It’s my spiritual center. I understand the people and the landscape.” Cestaro is putting the finishing touches on Everything Moves, a full-length feature about Provincetown artist Salvatore del Deo.
The theme of an intimate community and its characters runs through Signs From the Mainland. The deaf community and Martha’s Vineyard both function as islands, one actual, the other metaphorical. Ferry trips to and from the island frame the film and underscore the dynamic of isolation. It can be a place of alienation but also of deep connection.
During the filming, Mansfield serendipitously met a deaf islander, Connie Steuerwald, at the Chilmark General Store. She becomes an important character in the film who talks about yearning. Steuerwald recalls her experience of growing up on the island and being teased for her deafness but then returning and finding an understanding community, even if it wasn’t the mythical utopia of the past. She says she knows about 25 other deaf islanders.
“I wish growing up here I knew this place was special, but I’m happy I left, because now I know I belong here,” she says. “People make it feel like home. The people make the love.”
