38 semana cine e idiomas

Despite the high number of international students in Salamanca, for some reason, the problem of the lack of movies in English has still not been solved. It is a big question for me that in a city full of thousands of Erasmus students every single year, why not to play some moves in English or with English subtitle every once in a while? The thing is that as far as I know, Salamanca has three different cinemas: Cines Van Dyck (address: Torres Villarroel, n° 40 y 45), Van Dyck Tormes (address: Centro Comercial El Tormes, Avenida de Salamanca, 37900, Santa Marta de Tormes) and Vialia (address: Centro Comercial Vialia, Paseo de la Estación, 37004), and none of them has a schedule with English-speaking movies.

I think, since my arrival, I have seen discovered only one or two VO and VOS movies. The former means played on its original language without subtitles, while the latter means with Spanish subtitles.

I have been to the cinema three times so far. My first choice was Regresion from the Spanish director, Alejandro Amenábar, after not more than a month of living in Salamanca. I honestly don’t know what was I thinking, probably I wanted to challenge myself a little bit, but I ended up listening to my boyfriend for 1, 5 hour as he basically had to translate the whole movie for me. The next one I watched was Spectre, on one hand because I was very interested, on the other, I was hoping that a 007 movie has usually so much action in it that I was not going to have big troubles to understand a couple of dialogues. I was more or less right. Finally, the last movie I watched was The Revenant. The Oscars 2016’s date was so close and I wanted to watch as many nominations as I was able, so again, I gave it a try. But this time, I was really cautious: I only agreed to watch it Spanish, because I was told that Leo barely talks in the whole movie.

What I’m just trying to say with this is that if you don’t have an intermediate knowledge of Spanish, it is considerably difficult to go to the cinema.

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And this is how 38 semana cine e idiomas comes into picture. In Salamanca two times each year almost a whole month is devoted to international cinema in the Cines Van Dyck, when you can watch movies on their original language: in English, in German, in Portuguese, in French and in Italian – or at least these are the languages I have across so far.

The current 38 semana cine e idiomas event started on the 29thof February and lasts until the 17thof March. The schedule is the following:

• The Brand New Testament (29. 02. ) in French
• The Danish Girl (01. 03. ) in English
• Carol (02. 03) in English
• Not My Type (07. 03. ) in French
• 45 years (08. 03. ) in English
• 13 minutes (09. 03. ) in German
• Macbeth (10. 03. ) in English
• Suffragette (14. 03. ) in English
• Brooklyn (15. 03. ) in English
• Youth (16. 03. ) in English
• An Italian name (17. 03. ) in Italian
• And one more Portuguese movie, of which title I couldn’t find in English.

The movies are on screen at 17:30, 20:10 and 22:30 every day, while the price is 5. 50€ that I consider quite expensive actually. But you also have the chance to buy three tickets for 10€, five for 15€ and eight for 20€.

It’s a shame that that the Oscar winner Hungarian movie, “The Son of Saul” is not on schedule, but we Hungarians are so rare in this planet that there would probably not be a big audience… Anyhow, I am still happy for this event, because it gives me a chance to enjoy these movies on big screens and in good quality. So all of you guys out there who are planning to come to Salamanca as an Erasmus student with only a basic Spanish knowledge, don’t worry, there are ways to watch movies in English or in your own language in Salamanca.

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