Tongue Twisters(2011)

Tongue Twisters is an experimental film that explores language through sound and meaning. Built around the classic riddle "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"—a linguistic game of alliteration and rapid-fire pronunciation—the film examines how language breaks down when pushed to its limits. Director captures the linguistic reality of Berkeley by recording American speakers reciting tongue twisters across multiple languages: German, English, Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, Mandarin, Korean, Croatian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Japanese, Farsi, Portuguese, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. Many speakers use English as a second language, revealing how accent, rhythm, and phonetics reshape familiar phrases. The result is a playful yet serious portrait of how sound and sense collide when we speak.