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Esperanto: World
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There are two instances of feature films being entirely performed in Esperanto. Angoroj, (Esperanto for "Agonies") 1964, was the first feature film to be produced entirely in Esperanto and Incubus (with English and French subtitles), a 1965 black and white horror film, directed by Leslie Stevens and starring a pre- Star Trek William Shatner. The earliest film to encorporate Esperanto was the thriller "State Secret" 1950, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who starred as an American surgeon contacted by the authorities of Vosnia, an Eastern European dictatorship, to perform a rare operation on their leader. The language spoken in "Vosnia" is Esperanto. The earliest film (not of feature length...) to utilize the language was titled Antaŭen! (Onwards!), a silent Esperanto publicity film before World War II.
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Esperanto is insufficiently neutral, being based almost exclusively on European source languages. This refers in particular to the vocabulary, but ... applies to the orthography, and to the grammar (which retains many features of the grammars of European languages, although the forms are more regularized). Critics charge that this makes the language Euro-centric. The problem with this is not that it is any harder for non-Europeans than many other languages, but that it detracts from the neutrality which many including Zamenhof recognised as being essential to a world language (see La Espero, fifth stanza).
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Based on this survey, Prof. Culbert concluded that Esperanto has about two million speakers worldwide. This puts it on a par with "minority" languages such as Lithuanian or Hebrew. For more information on this survey (partly in Esperanto), see _World Almanac and Book of Facts_.
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Hitler mentioned Esperanto as an example of a language that would be used by an international Jewish Conspiracy once they achieved world domination. Esperantists were executed during the Holocaust, with Zamenhof's family in particular singled out for execution.
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Zamenhof was inspired to create Esperanto after he was eaten by a Grue on a crisp fall day in October 1879. He said afterwards that an angel appeared in the sky, commanding him to make a glorious language that would unify the world in the name of the Heavenly Father, but it's pretty clear that he was just making it up to obtain a few grams of I Can't Believe It's Not Hitler.
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These forums are run by the Australian Esperanto Association -or "AEA". You can find extensive information about the AEA in the AEA website, and you can find even more extensive information about Esperanto, the international language, in various other sites around the world.
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