Chennai’s guide for subtitled cinema

You walk into office on a Monday morning and find your colleagues passionately dissecting a Malayalam film that they caught over the weekend. Youfeel left out. And what do you do? You end up booking tickets for the evening show. But minutes into the movie; reality kicks in — it doesn’t have English subtitles, and most of the movie is Greek and Latin (read: Malayalam) for you.

But what if there was a forum that shared first-hand information about subtitles and subtitled shows? This was the moot question that drove Vinoth CJ (23) to create a Twitter handle called Subtitles Help, which has been passing information about the availability of subtitles for other language movies, played in the suburbs of Chennai, Coimbatore and Puducherry.

Vinoth CJ

As marketing head of Sathya Jyothi Films, Vinoth’s job required him to stay updated about the current trends in cinema. However, the lack of information about subtitles for movies in other languages was something that irked him quite often.

“I can understand Telugu to an extent, but it was difficult for me to follow Hindi and Malayalam movies. I noticed that a lot of people were raising this issue on social media. I thought: ‘Why not start an initiative, where the information about subtitles comes through me?’” And that’s how Subtitles Help came into existence in January this year.

Vinoth feels that Chennaiites, lately, have been largely consuming other language films. “They are anyway going to watch the big star’s films. However, they have also started showing interest in offbeat and niche subjects, which wasn’t the case before. Recently, I received a lot of requests for the Malayalm film Virus ,” he adds.

Vinoth makes sure that he posts information about subs a day before the film’s release. So how does Subtitles Help operate?

“PVR, Sathyam and Inox are three key players in Chennai. I’m in touch with their projection team and gather information from them. Since they are reliable, I’m able to address 90% of audiences’ queries,” he says, about the process. Most requests come for urban centres like Sathyam and PVR, he says, adding, “Oddly, though, I haven’t got any requests for Tamil films.”

For tier-2 centres like Kasi, Rohini, Rakhi and Vetri, Vinoth personally verifies the information with theatre owners. “Most of them are my friends, and we have a WhatsApp group. It is only a matter of 15 minutes,” he says, adding that the highest number of requests he got was for the Hindi film Uri: The Surgical Strike . Only a few production houses are receptive to the idea of releasing their movies with subtitles, observes Vinoth. He goes on to add: “The Central Board for Film Certification has passed a rule saying that subtitles cannot be added after certification. So, production houses are in a rush to get their films certified without subs.”

Subtitles Help, for reasons that are quite obvious, has become a guardian angel for film buffs in Chennai. And Vinoth says he has plans of expanding it as a public forum, where users can also contribute. “If I’m caught up with work or unable to reach out to remote centres, people can update about subs on the platform,” he adds. That plan, however, is yet to be set in motion.