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I’ve done many gigs over the years that have required translators—either to create subtitles or to be present for the Q&A’s—and I’m always grateful that they’re there to make sense of my work for the people who speak their language and depend on them.
But I’ll just highlight two of them here.
I met Massoumeh Lahidji when she translated during all the Q&A’s at a retrospective I had in Paris in 2013. There were many days of multiple screenings. An utterly exhausting job for her, I imagine. Before the first show, she said, “Just speak for as long as you want, and I’ll be fine.” I didn’t believe her, because in the past, someone had always had a notebook, and I’d say a small portion of something and then they’d translate. But it was true with Massoumeh. No matter how long I spoke, she would repeat perfectly everything I said (my French was good enough to understand that, and the programmers confirmed that with me.)
Everyone was in awe of her. For good reason—she’s incredibly famous as a translator within the film community, works in five languages, does all the major festivals every year (has been the permanent interpreter of the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes since 2007) etc. And she worked hand in glove with Abbas Kiarostami for many years.
She was kind enough to come up to Paris in the fall of 2023 to translate at a screening we did when Frederique Devaux and Michel Amarger premiered the film they made about my work; I was thrilled to see her again a decade later. And then, by a stroke of luck, as I walked through an arts center in 2024 in Madrid (she lives in southern France), we ran into each other! What a lovely coincidence that was…
I met Núria Molines Galarza the Punto de Vista Film Festival in 2024. Same stresses—lots of screenings, several interviews, a radio show, and even the translation of a book they made about my work. She doesn’t have the same depth of experience as Massoumeh, but I found her to be incredibly fast and accurate and very nice to work with. And I was fascinated by her system—her notebook filled with her own sort of shorthand, a combination of words and pictographs which made perfect sense to her and looked like strange cave drawings to me. My Spanish is pitiful at best, but I had the feeling she was always capturing all the nuances of what I had said—and the moderator confirmed my impression.
So, hats off to Massoumeh and Núria and all the other great translators who make it possible for our work to reach others across the great divide of language!
Before I left for a bunch of gigs last fall, my sister sent me a link to a NYT story about the swimming pools in Paris. BINGO!
I had never thought to go swimming when I traveled for work, and realized how great it would be to get some exercise, see a bit of ordinary local life, and not depend on those dreary “fitness centers” in the basements of hotels.
The first trip of the fall was to show films in Chicago, my hometown, and of course I went swimming in the most spectacular “pool” of all: Lake Michigan.
And everywhere I go now, I research the pools in the city or ask the programmers for advice about their local pools, and it has made work travel much more fun and interesting.
