Meaningless Babble

Variety sez: Babel is kicking up a storm in Japan, where a campaign is underway to get subtitled prints of the film included in the film's general release this April. Of course, the sections in 'foreign' tongues are to be captioned - this dispute centres on the lack of Japanese-language subtitling for the hearing impaired.

Nearly 500 hearing impaired people participated in the making of the film's Japanese section, and in January they were invited to a special preview screening. Sadly, not even this print was subtitled and the film was therefore incredibly hard for the audience to follow. If you ask me, this was an incredibly insensitive oversight on the part of the preview's organisers.

Ruruka Minami is a sign language translator who was called upon to assit during the casting process for the film. Minami is now leading the campaign to get the distributor to strike a number of subtitled prints. They are reportedly 'considering it'.

Does anybody know if the film played in a subtitled version in other territories? I'm generally seeing more and more subtitled screenings advertised here in the UK, though I can't recall if Babel was amongst them.