“Mesaĝo en botelo,” a Short Film in Esperanto

I just made a new Esperanto film, which I’ve submitted to an Esperanto film festival (the 6th American Good Film Festival). (It’s really short: under five minutes long. And don’t worry: it has English subtitles.) It’s called “Mesaĝo en botelo,” or “Message in a bottle.” My kids (and a couple of others) have acting or voice roles in it, and my twelve-year-old son Mark did the video editing. You might remember my Esperanto film from last year, “Honesta homo” (“An honest person”), which was about Diogenes.

I’m embedding the film below, but most importantly, please click through to YouTube and “like” (“thumbs-up”) the video there: “audience favorite” gets a special prize in this film festival! Voting finishes on Monday, so please do it now.

(I don’t think you can “like” a YouTube video when you watch it on this blog: click on the title at the top of the video to open it in YouTube.)

Thanks to Catie Neilson, the host of this year’s festival, and Alex Miller, former vice president of Esperanto USA and indefatigable longtime organizer of this film festival for the previous five years. Click here to see the full set of films submitted to the festival. (Alex also organizes the local Atlanta Esperantist scene—if you find Esperanto interesting and are in the Atlanta area, let me know and I’ll hook you up.)

Esperanto is the most popular of the constructed languages (and has been around longer than Klingon, Elvish, and High Valyrian), is extremely easy to learn, and is even easier to learn these days now that there’s an Esperanto course on Duolingo. (Back in 1997-98, I had to learn it using a book. Now, I’ve finished the Esperanto and Klingon courses on Duolingo.) The film reflects that I visited Esperantists earlier this year in Białystok, Poland, where Ludwik Zamenhof, the guy who founded the language in the 1870s-80s, was born; and I might go to the world congress next year in Brno.

And remember, please click through to YouTube and “like” my video (and spread the word)!

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