for months, i wanted to watch “io bacio… tu baci” (1961). it’s a musicarello film. well, you probably haven’t heard of “musicarello”. it’s basically an italian musical genre that died decades ago. simple plot, amazing songs, that’s it.
anyway, the film exists on youtube but no subtitles. nowhere. not even italian ones. it was impossible to watch for non-italian speakers, and that made me want to watch it even more.
months ago i found an old dvd rip of the film on a russian torrent site. i thought maybe it has subtitles, so i started downloading. 0% progress. no peers. it stayed there for months, typical torrent problem. so i gave up.
then last week, somehow, one peer connected. even though the download was slow, it finished overnight.
i checked immediately, and thank god, italian subtitles were there, but as images, not text. this means i couldn’t just copy-paste them to translate. i had to use ocr to convert them to text.
the technical nightmare
i used subtitleedit with tesseract 5.5.0 ocr to convert image subtitles to text. sounds simple. it wasn’t. ocr often reads letters wrong, punctuation wrong, every subtitle needed manual checking. one by one. all of them.
once i had the clean italian srt file, it was time for translation. since i don’t speak italian, i had to use something to translate. google translate and deepl are definitely not the best for this because they can’t understand the context.
so ai translation was the only option. but sending the whole file to ai and tell it to translate? terrible idea. ai should not be used like this, ai is not a magic wand, it’s just a tool. if you use it for instant results, you will get terrible results. human + ai collab is the way to go.
so i wrote a python script to split the srt into chunks. then i had 22 short chunks. i wrote a detailed prompt for ai, translated each chunk separately to english and turkish. then merged everything back.
another python script compared the translations to the original italian timing. fixed any timing errors automatically. now i had perfect english and turkish subtitles, same format as the original.
does it actually make sense? i mean, are translations from ai actually accurate for the film? only way to know was to watch it. so finally, i watched it yesterday. translation was 99% accurate, way better than expected. corrected only a few lines to make sense. overall, i was very satisfied.
was it worth it?
the plot? simple. a construction company owner wants to build new apartments, but an old guy refuses to sell his house. but company owner’s daughter falls in love with a musician who hangs out there. together, they open a nightclub called “io bacio… tu baci” to save the place from the construction company.
but honestly, the plot doesn’t matter. musicarello films exist for one reason: music. the film has mina’s “il cielo in una stanza”, celentano’s “24 mila baci”, peppino di capri’s “i te vurria vasa”, and many more. that’s enough for me. the plot just fills time between songs.
but why?
did the film deserve this effort? probably not if you are a cinephile. it’s a musical with a simple story as i said. but if you are a music lover, absolutely worth it. i don’t regret a second of it. celentano is 23, same age as me! mina is also 21. these alone make this film a must-watch for me.
it’s also great to see 60s italy, the music, the fashion, the people, the culture. if you remember my post “being homeless in another country”, you know how i love italy.
anyway, sometimes ambition meets technology and you end up subtitling a 1961 italian film that has been lost for decades… i’m probably the only one who has english and turkish subtitles for this film, and i did it just for fun. sounds crazy, i know. but i think celentano would be proud.
here you can watch the film if you want, of course with subtitles :)
note: the film is hosted via mux, if you are the copyright holder and want it removed, please contact me at