In this project, I asked eight people to dub for a short film cut from a Chinese movie called “Raise the Red Lantern“. I asked them to say what they think the character is saying based on all they have seen. All the eight people are from different background (South Korea, America, Germany, Ecuador,Addis Ababa……). Some of them are from Asia country, but not China, some of them are born Chinese but grow up in the United States, some of them are learning Chinese. I choose them because I want to see if there is a culture gap or not. I found it interesting that the emotion is universal but some parts of the culture are not universal at all. It is also interesting that several of them talk about foot binding, which is actually not the case here. It appears that people are tentative to link the scene to things they already known when the scene is not familiar. I did not put the “right answer” here in the video in order to give the space for the audience to have their own understanding of this single cut. If they are interested, it is a really great film to watch!

At the second part of this video, the bigger screen is the beginning part and ending scene of the movie and the small screen is my friends explaining why they think the character says that and what is happening. It is really interesting to see the culture gap and some similarities here.