94th Academy Awards · 2022
CODA
Directed byCooked up by Sian Heder
“Every family has its own language.”
“Choir kid with main character vocals 🎶🤟”
The storyThe lore 📖
As a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults), Ruby is the only hearing person in her deaf family. When the family's fishing business is threatened, Ruby finds herself torn between pursuing her love of music and her fear of abandoning her parents.
Ruby is the only hearing person in her Deaf family, and she's basically their translator for the family fishing business. Then she discovers she can SING, and her choir teacher says she could go to music school. Torn between her family and her dreams — the final song with sign language had me crying fr fr 🎶🤟😭
What critics & audiences sayThe receipts 🧾
Tomatometer
94%
Fresh
#30 of 98 winnersFilming locationsWhere they shot it 📍
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Gloucester
Massachusetts
The fishing town hosted the mid-2019 shoot, including the family’s cluttered clapboard home and a real trawler.
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Shalin Liu Performance Center
Rockport, Massachusetts
Stood in for Berklee for Ruby’s audition.
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Steel Derrick quarry
Rockport, Massachusetts
Scenes set in a flooded quarry were filmed at this Rockport quarry.
Fun factsFacts that go hard 🤓
- The financiers resisted casting deaf actors as the deaf family members, but Marlee Matlin, the first actor cast, threatened to drop out unless they did. The financiers relented.Wikipedia · Casting
- CODA became the first film from a streaming service and the first Sundance premiere to win Best Picture. Apple had bought it at Sundance for a festival-record $25 million.Wikipedia · Accolades
- Apple's $25 million purchase enraged international distributors that Pathé had pre-sold the film to in order to fund its $10 million budget. Some refused buyback offers and released it in theaters anyway.Wikipedia · Screening
- The film was first rated R for the profanity shown in subtitles of the deaf characters' signing. Troy Kotsur said it took several fights with the MPA to get a PG-13.Wikipedia · Streaming
- Troy Kotsur became the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar, and his BAFTA win made him the first deaf person ever to win a BAFTA.Wikipedia · Accolades
- CODA won Best Picture with just three nominations, the fewest for a Best Picture winner since Grand Hotel in 1932, and it won all three.Wikipedia · Accolades
- Sian Heder learned American Sign Language while writing the script, and about 40% of the screenplay ended up in ASL.Wikipedia · Development and writing
- Emilia Jones took voice lessons and learned ASL for nine months before filming, and was chosen after Heder auditioned hundreds of teenage girls.Wikipedia · Casting
- CODA is a remake of the French film La Famille Bélier, but Sian Heder moved the story from a rural French dairy farm to the fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, which she knew from childhood summers.Wikipedia · Development and writing
- Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur, and Daniel Durant already knew one another from Deaf West Theatre's production of Spring Awakening, and Heder found Kotsur by seeing him in a Deaf West show.Wikipedia · Casting