Leeds International Film Festival 2020
Top picks and subtitle choices at LIFF 2020
The Leeds International Film Festival is one of my favourite events of the year. Having volunteered in 2018, I always look forward to getting an early peek at the best new releases in international film and documentary. Sadly, like many events this year, the on-site festival was cancelled last minute due to the COVID lockdown 2.0. Fortunately, they had already introduced the Leeds Film Player with a small selection from the programme, and so the festival went entirely online.
This year, I enjoyed making the most of the bargain £20 short film pass and ended up watching 61 shorts, 6 features and 1 documentary. It was interesting to see that the quality of the subtitle translations was much poorer in the short films, perhaps because lower budgets result in production companies using inexperienced or non-native translators. That being said, the films themselves were always great, so here are some of my top picks and thoughts on the subtitle strategies used.
Feature films
Curveball: A True Story, Unfortunately (German: Curveball - Wir Machen Die Wahrheit)
This German and English-language satirical drama is based on a lie that sparked the Iraq war. It focuses on a bio-weapon scientist, played by Sebastien Blomberg, who gets involved with the Foreign Intelligence Service. They're investigating an Iraqi asylum seeker who says he was helping Iraq build a bio-weapons programme. While the story's quite serious, it's told with a lot of humour and quick, snappy narration.
The English subtitles were very natural and imaginative, which made them read as a really well-written script in and of themselves. The subtitler often opted for succinct, idiomatic phrases when the original German was perhaps a bit blander. For example:
DE: "Doctor, wir verstehen uns."
EN: "We're on the same page."
DE: "Hier können sie nachlesen."
EN: "Here, read up."
You could tell that this was the type of film that had allowed sufficient time for the translator to really work on the subtitles. They lived up to the quality of the original script, rather than being an afterthought, which reminded me a bit of the process for Parasite.
As a subtitler, however, I was interested to see the translator had used subtitles containing two dialogue instances per line. Sometimes, there were four speakers in one subtitle (two per line). It's a technique you sometimes see in SDH for short sentences, but I've never seen it in interlingual subtitles. I can see how it helps when there is a lot of overlapping, fast-paced speech, but I did find it confusing to identify which part of the subtitle translated which speaker's speech, despite being a German speaker.
For example, there was one subtitle with three speakers:
Mr. Schatz?
-Yes. -About the accident.
I'd be interested to see if this is a technique that becomes more popular as viewers become more used to reading subtitles. For now, I don't think I'll be seeing it on style guides just yet!
Two of Us (French: Deux)
This is a beautiful love story about two women who have hidden their relationship for twenty years and live opposite each other in separate apartments. There's quite an age gap, with the eldest woman too afraid to tell her children about her lover. When she falls ill, her partner can't admit her identity to the carer or family, and so she becomes pushed out of her partner's life and painfully watches from across the hall as they care for her.
I thought it dealt very sensitively with the issues of power in caregiving. You find yourself unsure of who to side with - her children or the partner. It was a breath of fresh air to see a love story about older women, and it was portrayed very sensitively.
The younger woman is played by a German actress, Barbara Sukowa, who spoke French incredibly well, but it got me thinking about how odd it must be to act in your second language. I think it worked very well, as the nationality of the woman is another thing that adds to her alienation in the relationship.
Short films
Cloudy days (Chinese and Vietnamese)
A woman marries an older man but falls for her stepson who's much nicer and respectful. I really enjoyed this short. It's playful, moving and makes you feel for the woman (watch the first scene, and you'll see why).
While the translations were fine, I do have to note the absolutely ridiculous choice to include two sets of subtitles in one scene where the characters are speaking at the dinner table and have the radio on in the background. The subtitle translator must have felt that the audience needed to understand what was being said on the radio, and so there were two rows of one-line subtitles to take in simultaneously. It was impossible to follow and resulted in the viewer missing out on both channels of information, which was probably not the desired effect!
MADA (MOTHER) (English)
This short followed three days in the life of a young mother who lives with her son and mother in Jamaica. The young boy has a favourite doll, which causes a conflict between the grandmother and her daughter as they both have conflicting notions about how to protect him. The grandmother believes the doll is too feminine and he'll get bullied, while the mother wants him to be himself.
The Jamaican English dialogue was subtitled, as some syntax and words differed from UK or US English, despite being mostly understandable. While I understand the choice to provide subtitles, some choices were unusual. Whenever the grandmother is praying for her grandson, the subtitler provided the name of the psalm name and number, rather than transcribing the speech itself. This was strange when she spoke the Lord's Prayer, for example, which could be heard and recognised instantly by most English-speaking viewers. Despite this, I don't necessarily know the relevant psalm name and number. It made me wonder whether we were being given more information than the original Jamaican English audience and whether it was necessary.
In many short films set in English-speaking countries like Ghana, I was interested to see that English dialogue was captioned and heavily paraphrased. Sometimes, this was done to correct syntax that would be considered incorrect in Standard English, but often, I felt that it was unnecessary and confusing if the speech could be heard clearly. For example, "Yeah, I don't know" was translated as "Yeah, me neither", and "Are you angry?" was changed to "Are you mad?" in Good Night. It's a little like an interpretation of the meaning, rather than a transcript of what's said, despite the original being perfectly fine as it is. The viewer can hear the original utterance and notices that it's different, so it's quite jarring to see different words written down. Like with SDH, I believe minor edits are okay if they aid readability, but any major differences are too distracting. Perhaps it's a choice that I notice as a subtitler, but the average viewer wouldn't notice it, so I'd be keen to see whether this is common practice.
I won't list them all, but here are some other short and feature films that you should look out for this year:
And Tomorrow the Entire World (German) - A student joins a subdivision of Antifa, and things escalate as they fight against a group of neo-Nazis. Very gripping!
The Present (Arabic, Hebrew and English) - A man crosses the West Bank to buy his wife an anniversary gift. Really quite heart-breaking!
Virago (Estonian) - Virago is a village where no men have lived past their 40th birthday. Very quirky and playful!
So What if the Goats Die (Arabic) - A shepherd travels to get supplies from the market village, but when he gets there, it's deserted. Something odd has happened. An unexpected mash-up of genres!
You can access the entire programme here. I find it really useful to look back at previous programmes if I'm ever looking for a good film to watch. Often, they'll end up on Amazon Prime or Netflix after a year or so!