F ar from the Tree , Andrew Solomon’s brilliant nonfiction book about parenting children different from oneself, offers the useful distinction between vertical and horizontal identities. Vertical identities are inherited – a family name, an ethnicity, or a nationality; horizontal identities are qualities that define us which parents may have nothing to do with, such as the kinship people with autism feel with one another, or being gay or deaf.

Deaf, a Spanish-language film directed by Eva Libertad that stars Libertad’s own deaf sister Miriam Garlo, offers a near-perfect fictional illustration of the tension between vertical and horizontal identities within a newly minted nuclear family. Professional potter Angela (Garlo) is deaf, and married to farmer Hector, a hearing man, and the two

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