Why is a film with 11 minutes of Catalan considered the original Catalan version?

BarcelonaWhat is a Catalan film? Intuitively, we might say a film spoken in Catalan. But in an increasingly diglossic reality marked by migration, what happens when cinema adopts a naturalistic approach to capture the mosaic of languages ​​and cultures that coexist in our societies? Can we continue to speak in the singular of the language from a movie? An interesting example of this situation is Very farGerard Oms's magnificent directorial debut, an autobiographically inspired story about an Espanyol fan who, after accompanying the team on a trip to the Netherlands, decides not to return to Catalonia and stay to live in Utrecht, where nobody knows or speaks the local language.

The protagonist of Very far -one Mario Casas extraordinary – speaks in Spanish with his brother, family, and friends parakeets and his Moroccan colleagues at work. With everyone else he knows in Utrecht, he communicates in English and only speaks Catalan with a classmate from his Dutch classes (David Verdaguer) who is also Catalan. If we start the stopwatch, Very far Catalan is spoken for a total of eleven minutes out of the film's one hundred minutes. However, the rating from the Catalan Institute of Cultural Enterprises (ICEC) states that it is a film in its original Catalan version, a condition that not only allows it to access specific public funding for Catalan-language cinema but also to be nominated in the best film category at the Gaudí Awards, reserved for films in Catalan.

How is it determined that the language of Very far What is Catalan? Before a film's age rating is determined, producers must submit a declaration to the ICEC (Catalan Institute of Cinematography) detailing the percentage of languages ​​used in the original filming. The language with the highest percentage determines the film's original version. In the case of Very farThe declared percentages are 34.95% Catalan, 28.45% Spanish, 19.41% English, 15.23% Dutch, and 1.94% Arabic. These percentages are not calculated based on screen time for each language, but rather, as established by the Film Law, on the number of words in the filmed script, whether spoken by the protagonist or in background dialogue. The ICEC reports that, normally, the producers' declarations are sufficient, but if the percentages are very balanced, a recount is carried out to verify the data. This was done in the case of Very far, and it was verified that the percentages were exact.

That the 11 minutes of Catalan of Very far The fact that 34.95% of the film uses Catalan has much to do with the verbose nature of Verdaguer's character, an exception in a rather contemplative film where silences and the expressive language of images predominate, with few but significant dialogues. The film, in any case, conveys great naturalness in its choice of language for each situation, tailored to the linguistic reality of each character. That is to say, the use of Catalan never seems forced to meet a linguistic quota. But the fact that a film with only eleven minutes of Catalan could win an award reserved for Catalan-language films this Sunday might force us to reconsider... What do we talk about when we talk about Catalan cinema?.