International
France looks to breach Great Wall
HONG KONG: The biggest trade mission at the convention has come from France, which is aggresively looking at pushing their film and television content across the Great Wall that is China.
The seriousness with which France is approaching the issue can be gauged from the overwhelming presence of all things French at Filmart 2005, to the extent that Day 3 of the convention was headlined “French Day”. 37 companies are represented at Filmart led by Unifrance (largest exhibitor whose booth covers a massive 1125 sq m area at the convention centre), Film France and Ile De France Film Commission.
“This is a very good sign for Hong Kong and Asia that the French film and television business community is looking east again,” said Raymond Yip, TDC director of service promotion.
Speaking at the main session today “Franco-Chinese Partnerships Session”, Patrick Lamassoure made an impassioned call for Asian companies to get active in French co-production opportunities.
The biggest attraction that France offers, according to Lamassoure, is not just in locations and technical and creative expertise but also due to the fact that the French government is actively involved in promoting co-production efforts.
The French subsidy system works in a proactive manner in that it is not the individual but the industry itself that is tapped for funding activities. A tax of 10.9 per cent is collected on cinema hall tickets, and as far as television companies are concerned 5.5 per cent of their annual turnover goes in the entertainment tax.
The better a company does either in the box office or on TV in terms of ratings the higher the entitlement that the company has to access subsidy funding. There is a rider though. All the money thus obtained can only be used in film/TV production, nothing else.
Interestingly, in the whole of Asia, it is only India and Sri Lanka that have treaties in place that facilitate such co-production activities. In all other Asian markets, it is through private initiative that co-productions get off the ground.
Asked to provide examples of co-productions that had won critical and box office success, Lamassoure said that it was mostly in the art house circuit that the films had featured. However, one of the delegates present at the session, pointed out that two films that had tasted success internationally were Samsara (directed by Nalin Pan) and film adaptation of Roland Joffe’s City of Joy (starring Patrick Swayze, Om Puri, Pauline Collins).
As for television, there appears to be little activity happening between France and India, either on the co-production front or in use of locations.
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 Sofía 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. Sofía 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.
