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[Laughs in Marathi]: The subtitle boom

Regional cinema is expanding outside its traditional markets. The reason? Subtitles

This month, Lucifer became the first Malayalam film to gross ₹10 crore outside Kerala, to quote the Twitter handle @KeralaProducers. Kumbalangi Nights made more than ₹4.2 crore in the ‘Rest of India’ market — about 10% of its overall collection of around ₹40 crore. Earlier in the decade, films like Angamaly Diaries, Premam and Drishyam saw big releases outside Kerala. This trend, of movies being successful outside their core territory, applies to many Tamil films as well, especially Rajinikanth starrers, from Sivaji to Kabali to Petta.

So what has helped these films expand outside their primary market? A good part of the answer is, simply, subtitles. With 23 official languages, every film here is a ‘foreign’ film to a vast proportion of audiences, and subtitles are the windows.

From being limited to festival screenings and overseas releases to reaching the homes of viewers, first through Doordarshan in the 80s and 90s, then via DVDs in the 2000s, and then through online portals now, subtitles have come a long way. In the past five years, they have become somewhat common even for commercial releases, especially when they travel outside their main market.

Does subtitling enhance the viewing experience? Or does it hinder it for someone rooted in the film’s milieu? How much is lost in translation?

Writer-director Vasan Bala says that subtitling caters to a “sophisticated audience, which is anyway watching world cinema and is open to engaging with a film with subtitles.” You have to be “really quick in reading and also adept enough to understand the emotions. But I don’t think it’s for mass experience,” he says. “When you are going for spectacle, style and masala, like in a Rajinikanth film, I don’t think there is nuance or space for subtitles. But for a film like Super Deluxe, it makes more sense…Click here to read the full story ”