Friday 28 December 2012

Watching a British film in Switzerland



Whenever it was the Gentle Giant’s turn to come over to London, I’d take him to places and/or events that they didn’t have in Zürich, one of which was the NFT (National Film Theatre) to see non-mainstream films from all over the world.  

When it was next my turn to go over to Zürich, he told me he’d just discovered they did have a sort of equivalent to our NFT, which was about to be shut down, so we went off to experience it before the opportunity was lost for good.  

The film was a 1988 British one, directed by Terence Davies, called Distant Voices, Still Lives, about a working class family in 1940s Liverpool.  

There were French and German subtitles for the Swiss audience.  I had difficulty understanding the Liverpudlian accent, so we ended up with the bizarre situation of me, an English-speaker, watching a film in English but needing a Swiss to read the German subtitles and translate them back to English for me!

(Switzerland, 1988/9)

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