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It opens with the crescendo of a dark, sweaty gig, a mixture of throaty vocals and feedback and cymbals clashing, before cutting to the almost-silence of the morning. From the offset, Sound Of Metal makes you incredibly aware of what you are hearing as well as seeing on screen; not just the conversations, but the background haze we hear every day but pay little attention to. When that is taken away, you feel it. There has been a lot of well-deserved buzz around this film - six Oscar nominations, four BAFTA nods, and several critics' prizes already won for stars Riz Ahmed and Paul Raci - yet it is perhaps not your typical Hollywood awards season fare. Ahmed stars as Ruben, a punk-metal drummer and former drug user who very abruptly loses his hearing; Raci as Joe, a deaf veteran running a home for addicts with hearing loss. It is a film writer and director Darius Marder worked on for around 13 years to bring to the big screen and had to argue for the need for … [Read more...] about Sound Of Metal: Why Riz Ahmed’s Oscar-nominated film shows us that deafness does not have to be fixed

Seeing Riz Ahmed on my Zoom screen came as something of a shock. He looked so...normal. He was wearing specs. And his demeanour was thoughtful and polite (we've known each other since the earliest days of his career, when Michael Winterbottom's explosive film The Road To Guantanamo burst out of the Berlin Film Festival in 2006). The discombobulation over his appearance was because his scorching performance in director Darius Marder's Sound Of Metal had become seared in my mind since I saw it last year at the Toronto International Film Festival (which I attended from home). In the movie — Marder's feature film debut — Ahmed plays Ruben Stone, a punk-metal drummer with Blackgammon, a duo with a fine Olivia Cooke as lead singer Lou. Riz Ahmed plays Ruben Stone, a punk-metal drummer with Blackgammon, in director Darius Marder's Sound Of Metal Ruben has a shock of bleached blond hair. In one scene, he performs in front of a real-live audience, shirtless; his body … [Read more...] about BAZ BAMIGBOYE: How Riz Ahmed became a real whiz on the drumsticks