Dispatch #35
Read about AI-driven film colourisation, the new luxury resorts deepening water stress in Italy’s South, and how a Russian-language online encyclopaedia is becoming a tool of targeted disinformation
Hello and welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.
This week, we start with a fascinating essay from a Swiss publication on the boom in digitally coloured film footage, asking whether adding colour to historical images brings us closer to the past – or takes us further away from it.
From Italy, a report investigates how the rise of luxury hotel resorts in the south of the country is deepening an ongoing water crisis in the name of a tourism-led model of economic development.
From Ukraine, we have an account of how a Russian-language version of Wikipedia sanctioned by the Kremlin is quietly trying to shape perceptions of history and geography in support of Russia’s war and occupation of Ukraine.
We hope you enjoy the read.
P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine.
Here’s what we’re looking for and how to let us know.
Shades of grey
AI-driven colourisation is transforming historical film footage, but could digitally adding colour risk distorting how we see the past and what we take to be authentic?
When asked in an interview whether she dreamed in colour, Jane Birkin replied, “No, I think I dream in black and white”. Exposed to the endless stream of glittering reels on our phones, most of us today will dream in colour. But what about our memories? Do we see the past in shades of grey? In Geschichte der Gegenwart, David Lange explores such questions through the case of digitally colourised historical film footage.
With recent advances in AI, film colourisation is undergoing a true renaissance. Lange argues that the desire to recreate a more tangible past is fraught with problems and misconceptions. It all boils down to patterns of perception and our habitual ways of looking at images, whether gaudy or black-and-white. On one hand, old films strike us with the “liveliness” of a bygone era; on the other, they are too grainy, shaky and monochrome for today’s taste, so filmmakers tend to add colour.
One striking example is Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), which uses colourised footage of the First World War held by the British Imperial War Museum. On top of adding colour, the director had lip readers dub their mute protagonists. As Jackson put it: “What was it like to be a British soldier on the Western Front?” This is precisely where the central question arises for Lange: can retrospectively colouring footage really bring us closer to the past?
There are now countless YouTube channels sharing coloured non-fiction footage enhanced with AI tools. Whether those reels really convey a more “authentic” past is questionable. Digital modification glosses over visual flaws while simultaneously creating a new layer of “historicity” (in German, “geschichtlichkeit”, echoing “schicht”, or “layer”). Colour doesn’t erase the history of an image, it creates its own.
From Technicolor in the 1910s to computer colourisation in the 1980s, filmmakers have long chased new ways to bring colour to the screen. Already in the very early days of cinema, when technology still lagged behind, artists were obsessed with colouring images. Digital colourisation techniques, increasingly adopted by directors in the 2010s for documentaries and non-fiction footage, are now accessible to practically anyone.
In the 1900s, celluloid film was hand-coloured frame by frame. An iconic example is The Impossible Voyage (1904) by Georges Méliès which includes 374 metres of film material manually coloured by Élisabeth Thullier and her daughter Marie-Berthe. The dazzling colour intensified the viewing experience, but the whole process was painstakingly laborious.
“We had 100 hours of original footage sent to us by the Imperial War Museum,” Jackson says, explaining the work behind They Shall Not Grow Old. “Part of what I wanted to do… was restore everything.” But what, Lange asks, is actually being restored? Can retroactive colouring even count as restoration? He argues that colouring a film is nothing like rebuilding Notre-Dame de Paris after it was damaged by fire.
There’s more: colour deeply affects how we perceive and visualise time. The colour image corresponds to a deeply ingrained expectation of normality. In today’s flood of images, reality is defined by what Lange calls “chromatic visuality”. Of course, black-and-white film has never disappeared from cinema; as a narrative device, monochromy is used for flashbacks to past events.
Colouring film footage reverses the relationship between colour and time. The black-and-white flashback, once a marker of history, now becomes an obstacle to the experience of authenticity (naturally, the Germans have a word for it: “echtheitsempfinden”). What feels real exists only on screen, not outside the cinema.
In the end, it remains open whether historical film should be reconstructed at all. Lange urges us to see digital manipulation of historical footage as a complex process reshaping how we engage with the past. Colourised images aren’t real representations of the past. They’re fake.
Original article (“Ist es nun „echter“? Wie die digitale Kolorierung historischer Filmaufnahmen falsche Versprechungen erzeugt”) by David Lange was first published in German on 13 July 2025.
It is available here.
Geschichte der Gegenwart is a Swiss online magazine publishing historically informed essays on current issues.
Summary by IJ
“All that glitters is not gold”
A new wave of luxury resorts backed by state subsidies are monopolising water in the already drought-prone Italian South, leaving local communities and farmers to deal with the consequences
When we talk about over-tourism in the Mediterranean, we tend to focus on predominantly urban phenomena such as Airbnb-ification and touristic “reification” of cities or neighbourhoods: that is, the processes where the popularised (but fake) idea of a place becomes its new material reality, where neighbourhoods with their own vibrant local culture are hollowed out and turned into theme parks for tourists chasing a misplaced idea of authenticity and lifestyles they first encountered as Instagram hashtags.
But as pernicious as these predominantly urban phenomena are, they are only a small part of the story. In a recent piece for the Italian publication Lucy sui mondi, journalist Vittoria Torsello describes how the development of a slew of new luxury resorts in the country’s south is adding to the water stress on already drought-afflicted communities, all in the name of building golf courses, swimming pools and water fountains for a lucky (and wealthy) few. (This development is justified by the deeply held belief in Italy, as observed by Translator, that “il turismo è il petrolio d’Italia”, meaning “tourism is Italy’s oil”).
Torsello’s article, “Oasi turistiche per pochi, deserto per tutti”(literally “oases for the few, a desert for all”), starts by focusing on the case of San Domenico Palace, the Four Seasons-owned luxury hotel in Taormina popularised by the television series White Lotus. It details how such endeavours are cropping up all over Sicily, a place abundant in water, but coming under progressive strain because of chronic underinvestment in its infrastructure.
The article reports that in 2022 – the same year Taormina was metaphorically flooded with fans of the famous HBO whodunit – “Sicily lost 51.6% of the water pumped through its water system, roughly 339.7 million cubic metres”. The island has frequently been forced into water rationing as a result.
The article then moves to Puglia – a region whose very name means “lack of rain” – to relate the case of La Maviglia, an ultra-luxury resort worth 200 million euros, scheduled to be completed in 2027. Kickstarted thanks to Zes Unica del Mezzogiorno – a policy which turns the whole South of Italy into a “special economic zone”, where tax breaks and cuts in red tape are supposed to encourage entrepreneurs to invest – the article’s author notes how La Maviglia has become a symbol of an extractivist developmental model which makes the South a new frontier for private investment, but with dubious benefits for the local residents and the wider economy.
The resort on the Ionian coast will be built on what used to be farmland by bypassing local regulations and town plans. The finished project will cover an area of some 202 hectares, larger than the nearby village of Maruggio, comprising an 18-hole golf course, “in addition to 70 private suites, 20 boutique hotel rooms, 35 luxury villas, gourmet restaurants spearheaded by famous chefs as well as a 5,000 square-metre wellness spa”. All of this needs water, and lots of it, in an area struggling with water scarcity.
The article notes that projects such as La Maviglia are part of a larger initiative promoted by Meloni’s government which, through tourism, aims to turn the Mezzogiorno (the way the Italian South is normally referred to) from economic backwater into the “locomotiva d’Italia” (literally “Italy’s train engine”). However, in the context of the deepening climate crisis and ever-more frequent droughts, it is unclear who will reap the benefits of these so-called “oases” for the ultra-rich and who will be forced to pick up the tap.
Original article (“Oasi turistiche per pochi, deserto per tutti” by Vittoria Torsello was first published in Italian by Lucy sui mondi on 10 July 2025, in collaboration with Magma Magazine.
It is available here.
Lucy sui mondi is a multimedia magazine which deals with worlds, real or potential, with words and knowledge from all continents.
Summary by BS
Rewriting reality
How Ruwiki is quietly erasing war crimes, legitimising occupation and remapping Ukraine in Moscow’s image
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it also began a quieter campaign: one of words, edits and deletions. In 2023, a new state-approved platform called Ruwiki emerged, a fork of Russian-language Wikipedia designed to align with what one might call encyclopaedic truth with the Kremlin’s worldview. A new investigation by Texty shows how the project functions not as a straightforward, and at least theoretically objective, reference tool but rather as a sophisticated engine of disinformation, one that rewrites history, geography and even morality itself.
Led by Vladimir Medeyko, a former Russian Wikipedia contributor, Ruwiki copied 1.9 million articles from the original site. But beneath a veneer of discursive neutrality lies a machinery of manipulation. Researchers from the Ukrainian Catholic University and Pompeu Fabra University found that only 1.75% of articles were changed yet those edits accounted for 14% of total views. The pattern is deliberate: focus on the most visible topics, particularly Ukraine, and reshape them to mirror state propaganda.
The changes range from subtle euphemisms to wholesale fabrications. Where Wikipedia might write “Russia invaded Ukraine,” Ruwiki prefers “as a result of military actions, the city was destroyed.” Culpability is erased through syntax: “missiles were launched” instead of “Russia launched missiles”. Terms such as “war” are replaced with “special military operation”; “occupation” becomes “integration” and in articles on towns such as Markivka, Ukrainian sovereignty is reduced to a “historical affiliation”. In these small turns of phrase, the moral and legal weight of invasion vanishes.
Personalities are not spared. President Volodymyr Zelensky is described as “a disgrace to the Jewish people who glorifies Nazis”. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s former army chief, is accused, without evidence, of “spending his free time drinking with girls” and hiding in a Kyiv hotel. References to Jewish ancestry, Holocaust history,and Russian war crimes are quietly scrubbed. Meanwhile, propaganda talking points about “neo-Nazis”, “provocations” or “Western manipulation” appear as verified facts.
The manipulation extends to sources. More neutral or international references – those citing actual Ukrainian legislation, for example, or BBC reports – are deleted. In their place come links to Kremlin outlets and tabloid headlines. The goal is recursive: guide readers deeper into the propaganda ecosystem. As Texty notes: “Replacing sources with unreliable and propagandistic ones plunges the user even deeper into the depths of Russian disinformation.”
This is not the spontaneous labour of volunteers. While Wikipedia’s global editors work around the clock, Ruwiki’s activity spikes between 8am and 5pm, Monday to Friday, reflecting the rhythm of salaried office work. Behind the façade of “expert moderation” lies a bureaucratised project of censorship, one that claims to uphold “Russian law” while cleansing inconvenient truths.
Historical revisionism is just as calculated. Articles on Stepan Bandera omit decades of Russian propaganda against Ukrainian nationalism, presenting him instead as a one-dimensional “Nazi collaborator”. The poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko is reframed as “rumours” or “plastic surgery gone wrong”. Sections on Maria Lvova-Belova, wanted by the International Criminal Court for child deportations, are stripped of the evidence supporting the ICC warrant, leaving only the line: “Under sanction from several countries.”
These edits, taken together, construct what Texty calls an “alternative Russian reality”. This alternate reality is a world where Ukraine is hostile, Russia is benevolent, and war crimes never occurred. For millions of readers, Ruwiki offers not information but confirmation: a simulacrum of objectivity borrowing Wikipedia’s trusted interface to disguise propaganda.
In rewriting the past and present, Ruwiki does not merely distort facts; it legalises occupation and launders aggression, embedding Moscow’s narratives in a format associated with truth. As Texty warns, this is “the concretisation of an alternative Russian reality, where war disappears, and neo-Nazis appear in every paragraph.”
Original article (“Росіяни пишуть свою енциклопедію: Рувікі, з якої викреслюють війну” by Inna Hadzynska, Bohdana Bakaj and Nadja Kelm was first published in Ukrainian on 3 July 2025, as part of Texty’s #Infowar series, which examines Russia’s information warfare and propaganda infrastructure.
It is available here.
Texty is an independent investigative newsroom based in Kyiv known for its data journalism and reporting on disinformation, technology and governance.
Summary by ZN
That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!
The Translator team