By Tanya Silerio
Medium 29
This year, the Oscars shocked everyone by giving their biggest award of the night, Best Picture, to the movie “Parasite.” The film is described . as a comedic thriller that deals with topics on class discrimination and greed. It had amazing reviews, won other major film awards like the Critics Choice Award, and made over $200 million in the box office. It has everything an Oscar-worthy film would need: controversial topics, an amazing cast, and an unforgettable plot twist. Yet despite that, no one thought it would win. In fact, many were sure it would be snubbed and not be nominated at all. But, in the end, it was nominated in six different categories and won all of them. The reason people were so skeptical over it doing so well is simple, it isn’t in English and, if you want to watch it, you will need to read subtitles as the movie is in Korean. In America, it’s hard to imagine a film with little to no English doing so well. It’s happened before with films like “Amélie,” “Life is Beautiful,” and “Roma.” But, it’s rare and doesn’t happen as much. It’s so rare that Americans are stereotyped as a nation that refuses to read the dialogue. This causes distributors to reconsider bring-
ing foreign-language films and leaves us with a limited list of movies to watch. If these foreign language films are shown, they are usually shown only in states like California or New York. It’s hard to imagine why a country with over 400 languages spoken has a hard time dealing with subtitles. It should be easy since other countries do it all the time, especially with how big the American film industry is. The rest of the world tends to watch the same films that we do that are in English only and are ok with it. With recent movies like “Roma” and “Parasite” becoming hits, it seems like people are now more open to the idea of watching films in another language. And with streaming services like Netflix providing many TV shows and films from all over the world, more people are watching things they would have never imagined due to language barriers. In fact, Netflix had a hard time with the hit series “Narcos.” In order to ease the audience into using subtitles for a whole episode, the show would switch from English to Spanish. Netflix didn’t want the show to be strictly English because they thought it would be silly to have these characters from Mexico speak only English. This tactic seemed to work as it is now
Photo by Catalina Garcia
Embracing Subtitles
