A WORLD OF MANY LANGUAGES

L’AUBERGE ESPAGNOLE – VIEWING GUIDE

T A S K S

A. You are going to watch a long excerpt of this film. While watching, you need to pay attention to
the following aspects:
 What languages are spoken in the film?
 Where do these students come from?
 What strategies do they use to overcome language barriers?

B. After watching the film, you can complete the following film synopsis:

L’Auberge Espagnole is a 2002 French film

directed and written by Cédric Klapisch. It is about
____________1, an Economics graduate student studying
for a year in ____________2, Spain as part of the
____________3 programme, where he encounters and
learns from a group of students who hail from all over
Western ____________4.

The title of the film literally means “the Spanish hostel”, and is a French expression meaning
something out of which one gets what one puts in; it is sometimes also used to mean a busy, chaotic place.
The film’s portrayal is in the first-person
perspective of the main character, Xavier, and is
hence mainly narrated in ____________5. Some of
the dialogue is in English however, and a significant
amount is in ____________6, as well as small
amounts in Catalan, Danish, ____________7 and
____________8.
As part of a job that he is promised, Xavier,
an economics student in his twenties, signs on to a
European exchange program in order to gain
working knowledge of the ____________9 language.
Following his arrival to ____________10, Xavier is
soon thrust into a cultural melting pot when he
moves into an apartment full of international
____________11. An Italian, an ____________12
girl, a boy from Denmark, a young girl from
Belgium, a German and a girl from Tarragona all
join him in a series of adventures that serve as an
initiation to life.
The film has a sequel, The Russian Dolls.
Adapted from www.allmovie.com