What is a filmina? The Spanish word behind Filmina

Filmina is a Spanish word for a slide: one of the pages of a presentation a professor projects in class. It comes from film, as in photographic film, and it was born with real slides, the kind made of film mounted in a small frame. In several countries, Argentina among them, filmina was also the word for the acetate transparency you laid on an overhead projector. And plenty of people still call PowerPoint slides filminas today.

Filmina, capitalized, is something else: the web app I built for studying from exactly those slides. You upload your lecture slides or the class PDF and it explains them out loud, slide by slide, pointing at the part it's talking about.

This post covers both: what the word means, where it comes from, and why I ended up naming the app after it.

Where the word filmina comes from

Filmina is built from film (a word Spanish borrowed from English) plus the suffix -ina, which works as a diminutive in a lot of Spanish words. A filmina is, literally, a little piece of film.

That makes sense once you picture the original object. Before digital projectors, a slide was a photo developed as a positive on transparent film, cut out and mounted in a small cardboard or plastic frame. To see it you put it in a projector, which shone light through it and blew it up onto a wall or a screen. That was a filmina.

The Real Academia Española's dictionary lists it with exactly that meaning, as a synonym of diapositiva, the more common Spanish word for slide. Filmina and slide name the same thing; the only difference is which word people use where.

Three kinds of filmina: film, acetate and PowerPoint

The word outlived three different technologies, which is why you still hear it in classrooms.

The film slide. The classic 35mm photographic slide in its mount. It was used to show photos in class (artwork, lab samples, maps), loaded one at a time or into a rotating carousel.

The acetate transparency. A clear sheet the size of a regular page that sat on an overhead projector. The professor wrote on it with a marker while lecturing, or brought it printed with the outline of the class. In Argentina, where I study, this was called a filmina for decades, which is why the word got so tied to the classroom.

The digital slide. When PowerPoint and laptop projectors arrived, transparencies disappeared but the word stuck around. Many professors kept saying "let's move to the next filmina" in front of a digital deck, and many students still ask for "the filminas from class" when what they want is the PDF posted on the course site.

English went through something similar: slide started as the physical film slide and simply carried over to PowerPoint.

Filmina, diapositiva, transparency, slide: are they the same?

For studying purposes, yes:

• Slide is the English word for both the photographic slide and a page in a presentation.
• Diapositiva is the general Spanish word, understood in every Spanish-speaking country.
• Filmina is the same idea, more common in some countries (especially Argentina) and with a classroom feel diapositiva doesn't have.
• Transparency is the acetate sheet for an overhead projector, and it's rarely used for digital slides.

If you came across filmina in a Spanish class, a syllabus or a conversation with a classmate, read it as "slide".

If you have to study from filminas

Whatever you call them, the problem is the same: a slide is made to go along with someone talking, not to be read on its own. It has few words, arrows and diagrams that made sense in class because the professor was walking through them. When you open it alone a week later, that's exactly the part that's missing.

Three things that help:

• Get the original file. The actual deck or a PDF with real text, not a photo or a scanned copy: it's easier to read and you can search it.
• Fill in each slide with what was said. Your notes, the lecture recording if there is one, or the textbook chapter that covers that topic.
• Explain it without looking. If you can talk through a slide out loud in your own words, you understood it.

I went deeper on this in slides with almost no words.

Why the app is called Filmina

When I started building the app, the problem I wanted to solve was very specific: I had a deck of more than a hundred slides for an exam and no way to get through it. I told the whole story in why I built Filmina. What I was missing wasn't a summary. It was someone explaining each slide the way the professor does in class.

The name came from there. Filmina is the word the classroom uses for its own material, and the app does exactly that: it takes the filmina you were given and explains it to you. It isn't a made-up name meant to sound like tech. It's the word students were already using for what they study.

What Filmina, the app, is

In case you landed here looking for the app and not the word:

• What it does. It explains your lecture slides and class PDFs out loud, slide by slide, while a frame shows you which part it's talking about. It also looks at every slide as an image, so it explains charts, diagrams and tables along with the text. There's more on how it explains each slide.
• Where it runs. In your browser, on any computer, tablet or phone, with nothing to install. It needs an internet connection because the explanation happens in the cloud, and you sign in with your email. Apps for Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad are on the way.
• What else it does. You can ask Mina, who answers from your own material, about a slide, a lecture or the whole course; practice with questions that don't grade you; review what you studied; and keep your class notes inside the document.
• What it costs. There's a free plan with monthly minutes to get started, and Pro, a monthly subscription.

If you searched filmina looking for the app, it's getfilmina.com. And if you were after the word, now you know: it's a good old slide.

Frequently asked questions

What does filmina mean?

Filmina is Spanish for a slide, one of the pages of a presentation projected in class. It originally meant a photo on transparent film mounted in a frame, and in some countries it also meant the acetate transparency used on an overhead projector.

What is filmina in English?

The English word is slide, for both a photographic slide and a page of a presentation. For the acetate sheet used on an overhead projector, the word is transparency.

Is filmina the same as diapositiva?

Yes. Both are Spanish words for a slide and the dictionary treats them as synonyms. Diapositiva is more widespread, while filmina is more common in some countries, especially Argentina.

What is Filmina?

Filmina is a web app that explains your lecture slides and class PDFs out loud, slide by slide, pointing at the part it's talking about. It runs in the browser, has a free plan to get started, and lives at getfilmina.com.