Subtitles and minority language dialogues among Oscar nominees

I've seen several of the movies nominated for this year's Oscars. I'm not particularly impressed with the new extended 10-movie lot for Best Movie. The 4 movies nominated in the Foreign Language category are quite more interesting.

One particular thing that I've noticed in those films. Minority languages. There's dialogue in Yiddish in A serious man, Corsican in Un prophete, and Quechua in The Milk of Sorrow (La Teta Asustada). That's quite remarkable.

As for Quechua in La teta asustada, it was touching when the actress Magaly Solier received a main prize in the Berlinale last year and she began talking and singing in her language (click the video here to watch it). The Quechua dialogue in that movie has been translated already into Basque for the Basque subtitle archive. That's a site that I created: I mentioned here time ago, and now it has its own domain: azpitituluak.com

There's another of the Oscar nominees already with Basque subtitles: Up, by Pixar. It's so bad Disney España decides to offer nothing at all in Basque. Other distributors produce movies or DVDs with dubbed Basque or subtitles in our language, but as for Disney, nothing at all comes from them. Looks like official negationist policy. So, it's OK that people take their place regardless of copyright. The only things Disney produces in Basque are licensed printed storybooks. Just crap merchandising: Disney may produce decent movies (Pixar's are excellent, certainly) but those storybooks, they are worth nothing.

Other subtitles around: these for Ten Canoes, in some aboriginal Australian language. And coming soon, for Atanarjuat (a film in Inuktitut), and for The Road, the movie based in the novel by Cormac McCarthy, in which the director of photography is Javier Agirresarobe, a fellow from Eibar, my hometown.

Maybe this new domain for the subtitle site marks also the revival of this blog, The English Cemetery. We'll see.