The 30th edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (https://www NULL.idfa NULL.nl/en/) (IDFA) takes place from 15 to 26 November 2018. One of the almost 300 documentaries screened at this festival is about the translator as the preserver of vulnerable languages and cultures.

Still from ‘The Miracle of the Little Prince’ by Marjoleine Boonstra

In her film, The Miracle of the Little Prince (https://www NULL.idfa NULL.nl/en/film/f537a354-0762-4531-a7a8-5ab65a2753cb/the-miracle-of-the-little-prince) , director Marjoleine Boonstra shows the portrait of four translators who translate Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le petit prince into their own language and culture. We see Lahbib Fouad who translated the tale into the Berber language Tamazight, in the far north of Europe we meet a woman who is a translator and treasurer of the Sami language and culture, in El Salvador a linguist tries, with the help of three older women, to make a translation into Nawat, a language on the verge of extinction in western El Salvador (https://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/El_Salvador), and finally we end up in Paris where two Tibetan exiles translate the tale into their language (which is under pression from the Chinese.)

‘A jewel’, according to critic Walter van der Kooi in the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer (https://www NULL.groene NULL.nl/artikel/verbonden-door-een-boekje).