The Broken R

For twenty-four years, a rare congenital condition prevented the filmmaker from pronouncing the letter R, effectively suppressing his voice. Returning to his parents’ home, he traces a personal journey where speech, identity and dissident sexuality intertwine, reflecting on visibility and the politics of difference.

Ricardo Ruales Eguiguren:‘“This is an essay about the voice, and this is the voice of this essay.”

I have always struggled to listen to my own voice because of how it sounded. As a child, I was diagnosed with Treacher Collins syndrome, a rare congenital condition affecting craniofacial development, hearing and vision. Limited auditory development often shapes language acquisition, particularly pronunciation. For me, pronouncing the letter R was impossible until a few months ago, when I worked on it through speech therapy. I believe the voice is [...] a bridge connecting the language of the soul to the body [... and] cinema the medium that made expression possible — a language of images and sounds, far more powerful.

The denial of my disability, together with a “non-conventional” sexual orientation, shaped an unstable identity. This project became a form of speech therapy, asking what it means to have a voice — as a son, a cisgender man, a filmmaker, a human being — and how voice reflects our existence and our understanding of the world.’