The Remand of Ivan Curry

In 1988, Ivan Curry, 21 years old and profoundly Deaf, was arrested in the New Zealand town of Waitōtara for the murder of his 15-month-old nephew. He was remanded without bail for the next two years. In the 1990 trial, the jury took only two hours to find Curry not guilty. More than a comment on the fallibility of the court system, this documentary (captioned by SignDNA) draws attention to the difficulties of self-representation for disabled people as a minority group. The figure of Curry playing himself in dramatised sequences intensifies the need to address this in ‘real life’ as the final lines echo, “No one ever said sorry to Ivan … there is no compensation for Ivan Curry.” The interweaving of conventional documentary interview techniques with dramatic reenactments of court proceedings, highlights the artificial construction of police charges brought against Curry.