Subtitling Our First Feature Film

This month we delivered our first feature-film subtitling project — an Arabic-language drama subtitled into English and French for international festival circulation. We have done a lot of episodic content and corporate video, but a 120-minute narrative film is a different beast.

What surprised us

Festival deadlines are unforgiving. Streaming platforms have rolling delivery; festivals have a fixed submission cut-off. We rebuilt our scheduling around that.

The director cares about every line. Episodic clients give us notes on tone occasionally. The director of a feature wants to discuss specific line breaks. We learned to budget time for that conversation.

Cultural references matter more in narrative. A documentary can footnote. A drama cannot. Every culturally embedded reference required a creative decision: keep, adapt, or strip.

What we kept the same

Our reading-speed and line-length standards. Some of the director's preferred line breaks would have pushed us over the comfortable reading threshold — we held our ground there, with explanations.

The film premiered at an international festival last week. We will let the reviews speak for themselves.