'Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore' Review: An Intimate Documentary About an Extraordinary Life and Career | Sundance 2025

Being the first in anything might be a momentous achievement, but it also comes with the baggage and burden of representing a whole group of people. For Marlee Matlin, that burden came at the tender age of 21, when she became the first deaf actor to win the Academy Award for her performance in Children of a Lesser God. Now, almost 40 years later, Matlin looks back at her life, career, and the progress of deaf actors in the industry. Director Shoshannah Stern looks closely at Matlin's life with the actress and chronicles the highlights and low points of her career alongside family members, friends like Henry Winkler and interpreter Jack Jason, and colleagues like Troy Kotsur and Aaron Sorkin. In Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, we get an intimate look into Matlin's perspective on the span of her career, her reaction to her life-changing Oscar win, her relationship with the deaf community, and her learning how to leverage her stardom in recent years.