🎬 Important take: subtitles can make or break a film or TV show
Last week I finally got to see Tale of Silyan, a documentary from Macedonia about a man (who, like me, is called Nikola) and the bond he forms with an injured stork he helps back to recovery. Beyond this intimate story, the film lumbers on familiar Balkan themes: migration, family separation and quiet despair about the future.
Visually, the film is beautiful. Much of it is set in a region deeply familiar to me – Kochansko. My father is from there and I've spent much time in that part of Macedonia.
And the stork and the storklings melt your heart!
Yet I left the cinema angry
👉 Because of the subtitles.
I understood the dialogue perfectly – it was in my father’s dialect of Macedonian, which I also spoke as a child. But whenever I glanced at the subtitles, I was shocked. More often than not, they bore only a tenuous connection to what was actually being said.
I say this as someone with over 20 years in translation, particularly in subtitling, and who last subtitled a film (from Serbian) for ARTE TV just last year. I fully understand the space and timing constraints, so not everything can be subtitled. But this time, that wasn't the full story.
At times the subtitles felt almost hallucinated. Basic facts didn’t match. For example, when the dialogue said “the wing is broken in two places”, the subtitle read “I can feel two bumps”. Even numbers didn’t align. And most glaringly, a sign stating “Лозје 8000 ЕУР” was subtitled as “Grapes 8000 euros” instead of “Vineyard 8000 euros”—some very expensive grapes.
I later asked a friend who doesn’t speak Macedonian and relied entirely on the subtitles what he thought of the film. His response was that it was “incoherent”. Hardly a ringing endorsement.
Normally I let these things go. I know very well the subtitling industry (as opposed to the profession) simply goes for “good enough”... but this time it's personal. My people were on screen having their voices misrepresented – people from a region that has endured hardship for decades and where 63 young people tragically died in a nightclub fire earlier this year. It felt like a slap in the face! They deserved better!
Tale of Silyan was touted as a possible Academy Award contender. It didn’t even make the final-15 shortlist. I can’t help but wonder why.
If you’re aiming for global reach, remember this: Korean film Parasite won worldwide acclaim in 2019, with its director explicitly crediting this to the quality of its subtitles.
🎯 Respect for the language and for the audience wins the game.
Subtitles aren’t an afterthought – they are the voice of a film beyond its borders.
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