An electronic petition to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy against the ban on dubbing English-language films in cinemas has received the necessary 25,000 votes for consideration. This is evidenced by the data on the President's website, Ukrainian News Agency reports.
The corresponding petition was registered on July 4, and as of the morning of July 10, it had more than 28,000 votes. Its initiator is Ukrainian actor and dubbing director Pavlo Skorokhodko.
The petition notes that Zelenskyy submitted to the Verkhovna Rada a bill "On the use of the English language in Ukraine", which stipulates that from 2027, all foreign films whose original language is English will be shown in cinemas in the original language without dubbing in Ukrainian.
The author of the petition asks Zelenskyy to review this point and make changes to the bill.
"I suggest not to destroy cinema dubbing, but to increase the number of sessions in the original language with Ukrainian subtitles, in order to leave the potential viewer the right to choose in which language to watch movies," he notes.
The petition emphasizes that in Ukraine dubbing has long become a separate cultural phenomenon and a part of cultural heritage, its cancellation, albeit gradual, will inevitably lead to a significant decrease in the popularity of the Ukrainian language, since it was dubbing that at one time contributed to its significant popularization.
Also, according to the author, the refusal of Ukrainian dubbing will lead to a noticeable decrease in the number of viewers in cinemas, therefore, cinemas, as well as the entire industry of dubbing film production, will suffer.
He also believes that such a decision is guaranteed to encourage a potential viewer to watch movies on pirate sites in Russian, since the movies that the viewer would like to watch will not be translated into Ukrainian.
As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, on June 28, Zelenskyy submitted a bill to the Verkhovna Rada, proposing to officially establish the status of English as one of the languages of international communication in Ukraine.
This bill prohibits the dubbing of English-language films in cinemas from 2027. According to it, foreign films whose original language is English are shown in cinemas in the original language with Ukrainian subtitles. It is predicted that the share of films shown in the original language with subtitles in the state language will be 50% in 2025, 75% in 2026, and 100% from 2027.
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