International
Films form important component of Festival of India in Peru
NEW DELHI: Indian films are making a global presence it seems. At the Festival of India in Peru that was recently inaugurated by vice president Hamid Ansari, few new Indian films and old classics including Raja Harishchandra (silent), Taare Zameen Par (Hindi), Ghare Bhaire (Bengali), Ardh Satya (Hindi), Bobby (Hindi), A Wednesday (Hindi) and Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (Hindi) are being screened. The Indian Film Festival is being coordinated by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry.
An India-Peru Literature Festival and an Indian Classical Dance Festival is also being held as part of the fest.
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Ansari’s visit is the highest ranking bilateral visit since year 1998 from India to Peru. The Festival would manifest many elements of long, rich and diverse Indian cultural heritage and would be the largest Indian cultural festival ever held in Latin America and the Caribbean. This reflects the special place that Peru enjoys among Indians.
The inaugural function was attended by the Peruvian First Vice President Marisol Espinoza and a number of senior dignitaries from the Indian and Peruvian side.
Indian Culture Secretary Ravindra Singh who is in Peru to mark the occasion said the Festival is expected to bring the Indian and Peruvian people closer to each other and will enhance people to people contact.
Highly reputed Indian writers like Arun Kamal, H S Shivaprakash, K Satchidanandan, Purshottam Agarwal, Shyama Prasad Ganguly, and Ms Karabi Deka Hazarika participated in the symposium on India-Latin America: Literary Exchanges and Influences and Contemporary Literary Trends and their Challenges in a Multilingual Society in addition to a session on poetry reading.
Several noted Peruvian Writers including Jose Leon Herrera, Pablo Carreno Cabrejos, Jose Ignacio Lopez Gaston, Marcel Velaquez Castro, and leading poets Carlos German Belli, Mario Montalbetti, and Marcos Martos would be participating in the Literature Festival. The Literature Festival is being coordinated by the Sahitya Academy.
The Indian Dance Festival in Peru is titled ‘Nrityarupa’, the mosaic of Indian dance which encapsulates the experience of Indian dance as it has evolved in various parts of the India. It offers a glimpse of the great mosaic of cultures that constitutes the Indian Nation, and demonstrates in a creative, kinetic form their dynamics in relation to each other. Six dance forms representing the diversity of India’s culture have been chosen for this presentation to audiences in Latin America: Bharatanatyam of Tamil Nadu, Kathank which is pre-eminently the dance of northern India; Odissi from Odisha in eastern India; Manipuri from north-eastern State of India; Kathakali of Kerala at Southern tip of the Indian peninsula; and Chhau which covers a wide swathe of territory in eastern States of the Union.
One seamless presentation of these dances has been visualized by leading to a jubiliant finish. The Indian Dance Festival is being coordinated by the Sangeet Natak Academy.
The Festival of India in Peru is being coordinated by the Culture Ministry in association with the Sahitya Academy, the Sangeet Natak Academy and the I&B Ministry.
LOS ANGELES: Acting has never been an easy profession, but in recent years, it has acquired a new existential anxiety. Artificial intelligence can now mimic faces, clone voices and, in theory at least, speak any language it is fed. The fear that actors may soon be replaced by algorithms no longer belongs exclusively to science fiction. And yet, despite the rise of digital inauthenticity, some performers remain stubbornly resistant to replacement. The reason is not celebrity, nor even talent. It is language.
On paper, this should not be a problem. AI can translate. It can imitate accents. It can string together grammatically correct sentences in dozens of languages. But acting, inconveniently, is not about grammatical correctness. It is about meaning, and meaning is where AI still falters.
Machine translation offers a cautionary tale. Google Translate, now powered by neural AI, has improved markedly since its debut in 2006. It can manage menus, emails and airport signage with impressive efficiency. What it struggles with, however, are the moments that matter most: idioms, metaphors, irony, and cultural shorthand. Ask it to translate a joke, a threat disguised as politeness, or a line heavy with emotional subtext, and it begins to unravel. Acting lives precisely in those gaps.
This matters because film language is rarely literal. Scripts, particularly in independent cinema, rely on figurative speech and symbolism to convey what characters cannot say outright. Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver is a useful example. The film’s recurring use of red operates on multiple levels: grief, desire, repression, liberation, and memory. These meanings are inseparable from the Spanish cultural context and emotional cadence. A translation may convey the words, but not the weight they carry. An AI-generated performance might replicate the sound, but not the sense.
This is where multilingual actors gain their edge. Performers such as Penélope Cruz and SofÃa Vergara do not simply switch between languages; they move between cultural logics. Their fluency allows them to inhabit characters without flattening them for international consumption. Language, for them, is not an accessory but a structuring force.
Beyond European cinema, this becomes even more pronounced. Languages such as Hindi, Arabic and Mandarin are spoken by hundreds of millions of people and underpin vast cinematic traditions. As global audiences grow more interconnected, the demand for authenticity increases rather than diminishes. Viewers can tell when a performance has been filtered through approximation. Subtle errors, misplaced emphasis, and an unnatural rhythm break the illusion.
There is also a practical dimension. Multilingualism expands opportunity. SofÃa Vergara has spoken openly about how learning English enabled her to work beyond Colombia and access Hollywood roles. But this movement is not a one-way export of talent into English-speaking cinema. Multilingual actors carry stories, styles and sensibilities back with them, enriching multiple industries at once.
Cinema has always thrived on such hybridity. Denzel Washington’s performances, for instance, draw on the cultural realities of growing up African American in the United States, while also reflecting stylistic influences from classic Hollywood and Westerns. His work demonstrates how identity and influence intersect on screen. Multilingual actors extend this intersection further, embodying multiple cultural frameworks simultaneously.
At times, linguistic authenticity is not merely artistic but ethical. Films that confront historical trauma, such as Schindler’s List, rely on language to anchor their moral seriousness. When Jewish actors perform in German, the choice is not incidental. Language becomes a site of memory and confrontation. It is difficult to imagine an automated voice carrying that responsibility without hollowing it out.
This is why claims that AI heralds the death of language miss the point. Language is not just a delivery system for information. It is a repository of history, humour, power and pain. Fluency is not only about knowing what to say, but when to hesitate, when to understate, and when to let silence do the work. These are not technical problems waiting to be solved; they are human instincts shaped by lived experience.
AI may one day improve its grasp of metaphor and nuance. It may even learn to sound convincing. But acting is not about sounding convincing; it is about being convincing. Until algorithms can acquire memory, cultural inheritance and emotional intuition, multilingual actors will remain irreplaceable. AI may learn to speak. But it cannot yet learn to mean.
In an industry increasingly tempted by shortcuts, language remains stubbornly resistant to automation. And for actors who can move between worlds, linguistic, cultural, and emotional, that resistance is not a weakness, but a quiet, enduring advantage.
