Seeing Cultures Through Film

Intercultural communication is the idea that people need to communicate between cultures in order to solve problems that may affect many cultures at once. It is also the idea that communicating across cultures can improve businesses and to reach out to other cultures through understanding them and not just transplanting one culture's ideas into another, but actually changing it to fit into the new culture. The movie Trainspotting is an excellent movie in depicting a culture in a way that is not stereotypical. It follows a group of friends in Edinburgh, Scotland who are heroin addicts and are from the poorer region of Edinburgh. This is one of the major themes of the film, exploration of the urban poverty and squalor in "culturally rich" Edinburgh. It shows the viewer a different side of the Scottish culture that the average traveler would never see, and it just goes to show that every culture has similar sub-cultures that other cultures have. It is also a great film in showing the everyday dialect and words that the average person in Scotland uses in daily conversations.