On February 1st, many of the theaters in Barcelona went on “strike” for a day. According to Variety.com:
Cinema loops are protesting Article 18 of a wide-ranging Catalan Audiovisual Bill that obliges half a film's print-run to be dubbed or sub-titled into Catalan for their release in Catalonia. Ruling does not apply to small print runs of 16 copies or below on European movies.
The new law would be “catastrófica y apocalíptica”, said Camilo Tarrazón, the president of a group of cinema businesses, the Gremio de Empresarios de Cine de Catalunya. (Perhaps apocalíptica is a somewhat more staid adjective in Spanish.) Mostly because of the economics: Josep Maria Gay, profesor de Economía Financiera y Contabilidad de la Universidad de Barcelona, suggested that with the cinema industry already weak, “such as the sector is, this law would be a death sentence.” A major Catalonian newspaper, El Periódico, cites figures that suggest audiences would be cut in half if half of all films were in Catalan.
On the other side, people supporting the law seem to be suggesting that the demand is actually there for this change, since in other media Catalan-language material has larger slices of the market. (Currently, the films released that are dubbed or subtitled in Catalan are a small slice of the market, something below 3% of foreign films.)
I have to admit, when I first heard about this I was skeptical. As an American, even a liberal American, my default position is to keep government out of business. It seems to me, though, that Catalan is worth preserving – I have a tendency to favor the local culture, and Catalan is already a language that has profound support and is used widely. For Catalan, duking it out with Spanish and globalized culture might keep it more marginalized for years, when it could be developing and becoming an ever-more articulated trove of literature and culture. So why not dig in now and reinforce the language?
