Movies: Language

The joys of 1960s modern education - as seen at a not-exactly-typical local comp....

"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...

Despite an unrivaled talent for communicating, Jake has trouble talking to women. When an impossible situation presents itself, Jake ignores the signs and goes on a wild goose-chase to pursue his quest for love. When his plan is foiled, a new best fr...

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 ...

Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), a professor of literature in Dresden, was Jewish; through the efforts of his wife, he survived the war. From 1933 when Hitler came to power to the war's end, he kept a journal paying attention to the Nazis' use of words....

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...

At what point in our evolution did we start talking? To paint, play music and travel? When did we build our first imaginary worlds? When was the need to believe born? In short, where, when and how did the contours of man's essence take shape? Going b...

There are about 250 people with a unique ancestry. Livonians – one of the smallest and most endangered nations. Each of Livonians has a duty to preserve their identity and the great history of their ancestors. Trillium follows the footsteps of a poet...

A surreal trip into the world of an extremely long german word....

CREE CODE TALKER reveals the role of Canadian Cree code talker Charles 'Checker' Tomkins during the Second World War. Digging deep into the US archives it depicts the true story of Charles' involvement with the US Air Force and the development of the...

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 ...

In this short documentary, a Musqueam elder rediscovers his Native language and traditions in the city of Vancouver, in the vicinity of which the Musqueam people have lived for thousands of years. Writing the Land captures the ever-changing nature of...

Ulivia explores what is accessible via the Internet in relation to Inuktitut. A complex language with several dialects which varies from one generation to the next. Inuktitut is threatened by dominant languages. Are there solutions so that these tech...

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...

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...

This is a film about stuttering. Dedicated only to some of you. Oh, and it's also about pigeons, cat callers, apple trees, Goethe's Faust, forests, bridges, words, letters, DNA, benches, shopping streets, worms, symbols, computers, fallen trees and g...

A story about the Livonian (Liv) language going extinct, and about the people still trying to keep it alive....

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 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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