Movies: Language

In the small community of Älvdalen in northern Dalarna, Sweden, the unique language Elfdalian (Älvdalska) is spoken. This documentary follows Ing-Marie's personal story about how it is and has been to live with the Elfdalian language....

The aging, conservative population of a small, sleepy village in the Italian Alps are surprised to see that a former French professor has settled there with his young wife and their three children to produce goat cheese, in order to escape the wrongs...

Documentary by Jean-Pierre Gorin about twin girls who spontaneously developed their own unique language as children....

How do German couples communicate in private? What are they arguing about? Is the way to a man’s heart really through his stomach? This docu-fictional hybrid production discusses such questions with the help of authentic interview snippets that were ...

An incident from the early days of Québec's quiet revolution, tailor-made for the cartoonist. It is the story of a Montréal commuter train, a unilingual ticket collector and a bilingual passenger. The passenger appears on screen himself to describe h...

Borrowing from an anthropological study initiated through the University of California in 1969, The Taste of The Name is a fantasia on universality. As a parallel to the elusive “umami” and its gradual scientific acceptance as a primary taste, we con...

For 50 years, controversial ethnographer John Peabody Harrington crisscrossed the United States, frantically searching and documenting dying Native American languages. Harrington amassed over a million pages of notes on over 150 different tribal lang...

An exiled poet returns to his native homeland of Pangasinan province after many years of absence. Through a mystical soul journey, he reclaims his primal connection to the water (danum), to the land (dalin), and to the people (katooan) where in the e...

Emile is an unhappy little vampire, doing a job he detests, in a world plunged into perpetual gloom. He serves a despotic mistress who loathes wrinkles, in the most extreme way....

An Asian film crew’s attemptsat making a film while navigating the strict laws of filming in the UK. They don’t have a budget or enough preparation, all they have is a shared passion to create. Stay Maybe is a comparison of cultures, at times sublime...

Come back to this day, next year. Ain't nothing, chief....

In a world embracing change, Ajeng distances herself from her Javanese roots. She explores the consequences as she grapples with the clash between tradition and modernity. "Wicanten" is a poignant reflection on the evolving dynamics of language and i...

Three Alaska Native women work to save their endangered language, Kodiak Alutiiq, and ensure the future of their culture while confronting their personal demons. With just 41 fluent Native speakers remaining, mostly Elders, some estimate their langua...

For some time now, The State Commission of the Lithuanian Language is at the center of tough discussions. For some, it’s an institution which safeguards the most important principles of the language, but for others, it’s an anachronism of the Soviet ...

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This tape is the first of Hill’s works for which he deliberately wrote a screenplay. The title defines the piece’s starting point: Alice in Wonderland asks her omniscient father why things get in a muddle. They then talk on a metalinguistic level. A ...

Michel Thomas is one of the most brilliant language teachers in the world. His usual clients are movie stars and business leaders. This programme takes him to a Sixth Form College in London to work with school pupils, to test his claim that he can te...

“When you don’t know your language or your culture, you don’t know who you are,” says 69-year-old Armand McArthur, one of the last fluent Nakota speakers in Pheasant Rump First Nation, Treaty 4 territory, in southern Saskatchewan. Through the wisdom ...

"Mother Tongue" chronicles the first time a documentary film about Guatemalan genocide in Guatemala was translated and dubbed into Maya-Ixil—5.5% of whom were killed during the armed conflict in the 1980s. Told from the perspective of Matilde Terraza...

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