Which titles to use for international co-productions?
Posted: 10/08/2022, 20:40
I think we need to decide on a definite policy of which titles to use when posting entries for international co-productions, but I don't really have any ideal solutions to offer.
When I first joined the forum I was told that we should use the Italian titles, excepting in the cases of international co-productions where the director, leading actors and main crew were foreign, in which cases the title from the country most prominently involved in the production would be used (so, for instance, we would use "Esther and the King" rather than "Ester e il re", because the director, stars, producers and writers are all American or English). At that time though Agustin Bescos was our only international actor, so keeping it Italian was quite straightforward.
Now that we have many more foreign actors, and particularly Spanish, it is becoming more complicated. With many Italian-Spanish co-productions having the cast and crew split 50/50 it is often difficult to determine which should be the prominent country and which title to use. It's also hard to decide if listings for the "Spanish" actor topics should favour the Spanish titles and "Italian" actor topics use the Italian titles, but then unless both titles are listed it makes title searches pretty impossible.
The only idea I can think of would be making a definitive list of co-productions which would be used to determine which title should be the "official" one to be used in the forum (which could also solve an associated problem of films that were released in Italy under multiple titles).
This would be a rather complicated undertaking, so if anybody has any alternate solutions or suggestions…..
When I first joined the forum I was told that we should use the Italian titles, excepting in the cases of international co-productions where the director, leading actors and main crew were foreign, in which cases the title from the country most prominently involved in the production would be used (so, for instance, we would use "Esther and the King" rather than "Ester e il re", because the director, stars, producers and writers are all American or English). At that time though Agustin Bescos was our only international actor, so keeping it Italian was quite straightforward.
Now that we have many more foreign actors, and particularly Spanish, it is becoming more complicated. With many Italian-Spanish co-productions having the cast and crew split 50/50 it is often difficult to determine which should be the prominent country and which title to use. It's also hard to decide if listings for the "Spanish" actor topics should favour the Spanish titles and "Italian" actor topics use the Italian titles, but then unless both titles are listed it makes title searches pretty impossible.
The only idea I can think of would be making a definitive list of co-productions which would be used to determine which title should be the "official" one to be used in the forum (which could also solve an associated problem of films that were released in Italy under multiple titles).
This would be a rather complicated undertaking, so if anybody has any alternate solutions or suggestions…..