Cinema Digest
A weekly email digest of what's playing in Da Nang — scraped, translated, and enriched.
The problem
Living in Da Nang, finding what’s playing at the cinema means navigating Vietnamese-language booking sites with no English option. I wanted a weekly snapshot of every film across CGV, Lotte, and Galaxy — translated, with context like country of origin and director — delivered to my inbox without any effort.
The approach
A Python pipeline scrapes movie listings from moveek.com, translates titles and metadata from Vietnamese to English, enriches each film with Wikipedia and IMDB data, and renders everything into a styled HTML email sent via Gmail SMTP. It runs every Thursday at 6 PM via a macOS LaunchAgent.
How it works
The scraper pulls HTML and JSON-LD structured data from moveek.com for three cinemas. A 3-layer country detection system checks Vietnamese diacritics in director names, then Vietnamese surname lookup, then Wikipedia infobox — in that order to avoid false positives. deep-translator handles vi→en conversion. Jinja2 renders the final email template with showtimes grouped by cinema.
Results
- 3 cinemas covered — CGV Vincom, Lotte, and Galaxy Da Nang
- 3-layer country detection accurately identifies Vietnamese films vs. foreign releases
- Fully automated — runs every Thursday at 6 PM with zero manual intervention
- Bilingual output — Vietnamese metadata translated to English with original titles preserved