Cannes Market Dailies

$25,000 Indie superhero film shoot with a Sony 3CCD created, directed and produced by Emilio Insolera with Stars Emilio Insolera, Ben Bahan, Vava, Danny Gong.

Ensemble Cast Includes Carola Insolera, Humberto Insolera, Susan Mather, Jesse Thomas. 

'Sign Gene', the first superhero film featuring deaf mutants with supernatural powers through the use of sign language, will be presented in Cannes at the Italian Pavillon, in the Hôtel Barrière Le Majestic on Friday, May 18th. 

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“Sign Gene,” written, produced, directed and starring Emilio Insolera, deaf actor with a long list of authentic deaf actors, centres on a secret agent, Tom Clerc, deaf from a multi-generational deaf family and is descendant of Laurent Clerc, 'the Father of the Deaf in America', that brought the sign language to the States two centuries ago. Tom is the carrier of SGx29 a powerful Sign Gene mutation but he lost a significant portion of his powers during a fierce fight some years back against his main villain, his own deaf brother Jux Clerc, the leader of 1.8.8.0. an evil organization dedicated to exterminating Sign Gene mutants.

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Hugh Denison, the head of the Q.I.A. (QuinPar Intelligence Agency), an agency affiliated to The Pentagon composed of hand-selected agents with Sign Gene mutation, sends Tom Clerc and his colleague Ken Wong from New York City to Osaka to investigate various intriguing crime scenes.  They end up in a fight with a Japanese gang led by Tatsumi Fuwa and learn that they can win the game only by playing it the Japanese way. Tom Clerc also learns that his powers are not lost forever.

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The film was shot between Japan, USA and Italy, has a James Bond plot with a touch of Grindhouse and makes several references to deaf culture and history and sign language linguistics. ​

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The producer and actor Emilio Insolera, is a well known activist, profoundly deaf since birth, polyglot, lived in various continents, each for more than a lustrum,  from North and South America, Europe and Asia. He is a Fulbright-Wirth scholar, with a bachelor degree in film and linguistics from Gallaudet University and a master in Science of Communication with summa cum laude from University of Rome La Sapienza. Insolera is also one of the authors of the first  Italian Sign Language multimedia dictionary. 

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