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By Jacqueline Grima
The 2017 Beyond Babel Multilingual Film Festival continued at Manchester Met last week with a screening of Alistair Cole’s 2016 film Colours of the Alphabet.
Beyond Babel is a festival that aims to celebrate multilingual life, showcasing a wide range of films that engage audiences with and broaden the visibility of multilingual communities. The events also aim to encourage debate and discussion about key multicultural themes such as cultural differences, multilingualism, education, global citizenship, mobility, immigration, integration and identity.
The second event in this year’s festival was hosted by Principal Lecturer in Spanish Studies and Director of Manchester Met’s Film, Languages and Media Research group (FLAME) Dr Carmen Herrero. Talking about the importance of engaging with multicultural issues in film, Carmen said, “Films have a power to bring together emotions.”
The film was introduced by Director and Lecturer in Film Practice at Newcastle University Dr Alistair Cole. Colours of the Alphabet follows Steward, Elizabeth and M’barak, three first year pupils in rural Zambia who struggle to make sense of an educational system where the language they speak at home is different from the language used in their classroom. With nearly 40% of the world’s population currently lacking access to education in their own language and less than 2% of Zambian speaking English at home, the film explores the role of language as a means of binding a nation together and addresses the question of whether education conducted in English is the way forward for children with a different mother tongue.
Of his experience of making the film, Dr Cole said, “It has been an incredible adventure making my first feature length documentary, especially living for 12 months in Zambia and getting to know the wonderful children in the film.
“Their struggle to learn was both surprisingly universal and absurdly anachronistic. Not learning in their mother-tongue represents a huge obstacle for the vast majority of them, as it does for millions of others around the world. I hope our film will help people understand the importance of mother-tongue education.”
In the Q&A session that followed the film, Dr Cole talked about how languages spoken at home should be valued, pointing out that there are 25 indigenous languages used in Zambia, commenting, “We are on a project to get Colours of the Alphabet subtitled in all these languages.” He added, “Language is not either or. It can be and! Why can’t it be and in school?”
An audience member went on to comment how approximate 40% of school children in Manchester are also not being educated in their mother tongue.
Colours of the Alphabet is made by Tongue Tied Films.
For more information about the Beyond Babel Multilingual Film Festival, visit the Manchester Met Department of Languages, Information and Communications website.
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