The ‘Malayalam Subtitle for Everyone’ movement that made world cinema accessible

Just like the Malayalam film industry, the film societies in the state did not really have a good time in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Many societies stopped functioning with dwindling memberships. The growth of satellite television channels hastened the process. But the seeds of their revival were in the digital revolution that was just round the corner.

It might seem counterintuitive but the film society movement witnessed a revival in the mid-2000s, at a time when high-speed broadband Internet and torrent websites became ubiquitous, giving people access to almost any film from any corner of the world. But this easy access to film did kindle ideas in some for community viewing of world cinema and inculcating a taste for good cinema in the masses.

The Open Frame Film Society was one such society founded in Payyannur in Kannur district in 2005. Within a few years, it did something which would revolutionize and democratize film screenings at the grassroots level, creating Malayalam subtitles for world cinema. Years ago, Doordarshan had begun subtitling award-winning Indian films in regional languages, but classics from outside the country remained out of reach for many.

P. Premachandran, a school teacher who has been an active member of Open Frame since its inception, tells me that practical difficulties during society screenings led him to the idea.

‘We used to hold screenings frequently in village centres, where a lot of common folk would come to watch. But we occasionally had to shout out the meaning of some of the dialogues even for films with English subtitles. We even thought of doing Malayalam dubs for some of these important films, which we wanted the people to really understand. That was the time when we began getting subtitles as separate files with time codes. We developed Malayalam subtitles from these. The first film we subtitled this way was Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. The screenings of these produced some great responses from the public, which gave us a lot of confidence to do more. One of the reasons for the increase in numbers at our screenings is Malayalam subtitles. It has certainly made world cinema accessible to a larger number of people,’ says Premachandran.

The Open Frame Film Society mostly concentrated on subtitling world cinema and classics, which were often used for society screenings. One of the premier events of the society has been the annual classic film festival in which ten classic films are screened over ten days. They also organize themed festivals for feminist films, environmental films, anti-war films, and even films based on the lives of painters, all of these with Malayalam subtitles. To get more people started with Malayalam subtitling, the society first organized a workshop explaining the linguistic, cultural and technical aspects of the practice. Later, in association with the Film Society Federation, it organized more such workshops in Thiruvananthapuram for film society activists.

One of the interesting experiments in contemporary subtitling happened at the Vocational Higher Secondary School (VHSS) at Irumpanam in Ernakulam district in 2010. When Sanal Kumar, the Malayalam teacher at the school, screened Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990), the film was not effectively communicated to the students through its English subtitles. On a whim, he attempted to translate the English subtitles in open-source software. It paid off with the students having a much better experience at the next screening.

Pramod, an employee at a tyre manufacturing firm, remembers reading film critic C.S. Venkiteswaran’s article in a Malayalam daily about the subtitling initiative at the school. A member of the Cinema Paradiso Club, a popular film discussion group on Facebook, he put up a post in the group inspired by the article, asking whether like-minded souls can get together to try Malayalam subtitling of the films they liked. Soon, Sreejith Parippayi and Gokul Dinesh, two other members, joined hands with him.

Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven was the first subtitle that the group did. They called their initiative ‘Malayalam Subtitle for Everyone’ (MSONE) and started a blog to upload the latest subtitles. The popularity of MSONE’s Malayalam subtitles can be gauged from the download counter on their website www.malayalamsubtitles.org which now reads 3.12 crore. Some of the spirit of the film society movement is visible in this mostly online-driven initiative by people, many of whom have not met each other.

‘Before long, a lot of translators became part of the team. We also started subtitling commercial Hollywood productions and films from other Indian languages, rather than limiting ourselves to world cinema. The real boom happened during the Covid-19 period, when a lot of people joined in and subtitles of entire seasons of popular television series were done. When we started this 12 years ago, we did not expect to subtitle even 100 films. Now our website has over 3,400 subtitles of films from nearly 80 languages. The number of translators now is above 600. The biggest satisfaction from the endeavour is that we have been in some way able to influence the viewing habits of a section of Malayali audience. Some young filmmakers told me that they had watched foreign films only because of Malayalam subtitles, which transformed their perception of cinema aesthetics,’ says Pramod.

Excerpted with permission from Ticket To Kerala, SR Praveen, Rupa Publications.