Saturday, July 23, 2005

Watching foreign language films

It's been a while since I watched a foreign language film. I used to love watching foreign language films, especially the ones that won Oscars. (Just to clarify, I'm not counting English as a foreign language.)

I think that the first Oscar-winning foreign language film that I saw was Cinema Paradiso, a lovely Italian film. It's one of my favourite movies. I love the two characters, the old man and the little boy, and the backdrop of using a movie theatre to tell a story. It's such a beautiful story too, if you haven't watched it, go rent the DVD.

Il Postino, a story about a postman, is another masterpiece. Of course, Life is Beautiful, another Italian classic got a lot of publicity as well. Well deserved too. Roberto Benigni, even used humour to tell a story set in the holocaust. Life is Beautiful was a brilliant film.

Another Oscar winner that I loved was Kolya, a Czech movie about a little boy and his step-father, a superb film.

I saw all these movies with sub-titles. In India, they usually dub the movies with English instead of sub-titles and I think that it takes a lot out of the movie. So much of a movie is dialogue and if you lose the native tongue, it's not the same. A movie like The Passion of the Christ was made even more powerful by the use of Aramaic.

Remember when DD was the only channel and they played national award-winning films every week with sub-titles. Some of those movies were superb as well. Does anyone watch DD now-a-days in cities?

Maybe some channel can start picking up Oscar-winning and award-winning movies and start showing them consistently. With sub-titles of course.

4 Comments:

At 1:16 pm, Blogger kozz said...

Most of these movies are on my "must watch" list since a long time. Most regular DVD lending libraries don't stock international movies. Found this (http://www.cinemaparadisoshop.com/) DVD lending lib in my locality that stocks international titles.
Deposits( refunable and nonrefundable), are rather high.
There another organization called Collective Chaos, who screen international movies on a regular basis. ( http://www.collectivechaos.org/)

 
At 11:13 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've seen the Cinema Paradiso shop but I've never gone in. It's on the list of things to do someday.

I have heard of Collective Chaos and I almost went (the operative word is almost) for one of their film festivals.

 
At 6:34 pm, Blogger Hasmita said...

Hi,

I enjoyed watching the French Amélie on Zee Studio recently. They keep playing it every few days, and it has subtitles, see if you can watch it. It's a creative and funny film that looks into the mind of a daringly diferent girl.

I haven't been able to watch the full movie, thanks to Mika, but I do want to.

 
At 3:44 pm, Blogger Percy said...

Yeah, Amelie, I've seen it a couple of times while channel surfing, and it looks pretty interesting. It's on the to-watch list, but I've never caught the movie when it's just starting, always in the middle, so I don't see it. It was the hot favourite to win the Oscar, the year Lagaan was nominated, but they both lost out to No Man's Land.

 

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