This study investigates the Italian film in Flanders and its translation, more specifically its Dutch subtitles. Traditionally, many disciplines have featured in films: economics, engineering, computer science, psychology, sociology, cognitive sciences, semiotics , linguistics, translation studies, and so on. In this PhD, we look at film as a cultural object, according to a tradition initiated by the sociology of culture. Considering a film as a cultural object allows us at the same time to study its double nature: material and symbolic. After all, a film has a material dimension - it is a commodity that is bought and sold and produced by an industry – but it also upholds. immaterial, symbolic values, as it may be a film about life and love, it may mark an era, or it may be life-changing. The sociology of culture provides the theoretical framework that allows us to study a film in this double capacity and to investigate how an Italian film is received in cinemas in Flanders, the professionals who import it and the symbolic values it represents. To understand how a film is accepted at a transnational level, the sociological aspect is complemented by concepts developed in the framework of Cultural Studies and Reception Studies. The Theory of Cultural Discount, where the value of a single film , if exported, is discounted due to cultural differences concludes the theoretical framework which is aimed at reconstructing the social world of the Italian film in Flanders. Sociology of culture, Cultural Studies, Reception Studies and Cultural Discount constitute the theoretical paradigm which enables us to respond to questions about why, and how, an Italian film arrives in Flanders. These disciplines are not concerned, however, with the study of the film dialogue and its meanings. The meanings (symbolic or not) of the film are not only transmitted by the film as a whole, but also, and perhaps above all, by the words of the film which, in our case , are the translated words of the film, i.e. the subtitles. The audiovisual ...