Two days before graduation at the Mississippi School for the Deaf, the 10 seniors are on their class trip to Dallas, and the elementary school is having its awards day program. The rest of the student body does what any other school does in the festive penultimate days of an academically rigorous school year: winds down. In Mrs. Peterson’s classroom, an educational film about big cats splashes across the projector screen. The captions at the bottom of the screen describe the demise of an antelope in the jaws of a cheetah.