The Perfect Sound

Katarina Zdjelar’s films critique the ways that language pigeonholes us, or reveals our status or social access. In The Perfect Sound we see a grey-haired man chanting single syllables over and over while a young man simultaneously mimics him. This is an ‘accent removal class’ for new immigrants conducted by a speech therapist in the British city of Birmingham. The Perfect Sound looks at the phenomenon of cultural assimilation through the erasure of difference in pronunciation and the production of ‘neutrality’, and points to the hegemonic capacity of language