International
#JapaneseFilmFestival returns to India
Mumbai: Japan Foundation announces the launch of the sixth edition of its Japanese Film Festival #JFFinIndia in association with PVR INOX. This annual edition will be held in 7 cities, starting in Delhi from 12 to 15 October at PVR Saket (Anupam). This will be followed by Hyderabad and Chennai from 2 to 5 November at PVR Next Galleria Mall, Punjagutta, (Hyderabad), and PVR Escape, Express Avenue, (Chennai), Mumbai and Bengaluru from 7 to 10 December at PVR ICON Infinity mall, Andheri West, (Mumbai), and INOX Mantri Square Mall, (Bengaluru), and finally Kolkata and Pune from 18 to 21 January at INOX South City, (Kolkata), and PVR ICON Pavilion Mall, (Pune).
The sixth edition of the festival, in association with PVR INOX, aims to screen 10 critically acclaimed and popular titles made by award-winning casts and crews. Each title offers insightful stories about morality and human behavior, moving and thought-provoking tales about family, support, social identity and exclusion, and enlightening narratives about the realities of adult life. Beloved anime from the Detective Conan franchise and the first animation film by legendary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki will also be screened at the festival.
With regards to this year’s festival, Japan Foundation New Delhi director general Koji Sato stated, “Cinema fans in India are quite familiar with Japanese films and are eager to watch more of them on the big screen. In response to the demand of our Indian audience, the Japan Foundation launched the Japanese Film Festival (JFF) in 2017, and we have been committed to offering the best selection of Japanese films ever since. We are working tirelessly to ensure that the sixth edition of the Japanese Film Festival 2023 provides the best cinematic experience, with a thoughtful selection of films that capture the essence of contemporary Japanese cinema.”
The Japanese Film Festival will showcase an exciting lineup, including the much-anticipated ‘We Made a Beautiful Bouquet,’ written by screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto, who bagged the Best Screenplay award for ‘Monster’ at the 76th Cannes Film Festival in 2023. The festival will also screen a 4k remastered edition of ‘Lupin The 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro,’ a beloved anime film directed by Hayao Miyazaki in 1979. In addition, selected masterpieces such as ‘A Man, ‘Anime Supremacy!,’ ‘Father of the Milky Way Railroad,’ ‘Intolerance,’ ‘MONDAYS: See you “this” week!,’ ‘Detective Conan the Movie: Crossroad in the Ancient Capital,’ ‘Detective Conan: Episode “ONE”’, ‘Detective Conan the Movie: The Last Wizard of the Century,’ will be screened at JFF 2023. The films will be screened in Japanese with English subtitles for the viewer’s convenience across select PVR INOX’s Multiplex and will offer the Indian audience a chance to experience the culture, art, and life of Japan.
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.
