‘The Tribe’ Trailer: The Provocative New Film Features No Spoken Dialogue, Only Sign Language

The Tribe is a film you should definitely put on your to-do list. The upcoming release from Drafthouse Films is a provocative, unnerving exercise in the value of show vs. tell, an affecting and layered drama that immerses the audience in the isolated world of its characters — a cast of deaf teenagers at a school in the Ukraine, who communicate entirely through sign language. There is no spoken dialogue or music, and the new trailer for the film effectively sells that premise.

From director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy comes The Tribe, which centers on Sergey, a new student at a school for the deaf, who falls in with a rowdy crowd of teenagers and discovers a society within a society — one that has its own rewards and consequences.

Teenage Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), a new student at the boarding school, realizes immediately that he must prove himself worthy to be brought under the protective wing of the school gang’s leader to survive unscathed. After an indoctrination of harmless initiation pranks and rites, Sergey’s new-found clique soon introduces him to their common activities of robbery, bribery and prostitution. At first assimilating seamlessly into his new role in the tribe, he finds himself compromised as he begins to fall in love with his female classmate—and one of the gang’s escorts—triggering a sequence of stunningly diabolical events.

The Tribe garnered a lot of critical acclaim on the festival circuit last year, and we had a chance to experience this singular, powerful film last fall at Fantastic Fest. You’ll have a chance to see it soon, too, when The Tribe hits theaters on June 17.