Romedia Foundation from Budapest host free online film festival showcasing Romani film on Dec 10-11 for Human Rights Day

The Romedia Foundation from Budapest, Hungary is organising an English language film festival will make it possible for audiences to get to know the work of Romani directors and films that showcase the values of Romani culture. The films, by Romani artists, come from Great Britain, Germany Kosovo, France, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary.

REGISTRATION AND FULL SCHEDULE: https://tinyurl.com/y5rnx95j

The screened film will include the works of Mustafa Sami, Hamze Bytyci, Lisa Smith, and Pablo Vega, and some audiences will also be able to see the award-winning Alina Serban’s historical short film Letter of Forgiveness and Roz Mortimer’s The Deathless Woman for the first time here.

The festival will pay special attention to children, who get a separate section with great animated films. Some of the films were made by Romani creators about other cultures (such as Africa: The Beat, which invites us on an amazing musical journey) to further emphasise togetherness and the fact that Romani filmmakers have a diverse vision and diverse interests, just like any other artist.

The festival is supported by the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture – ERIAC.

The Romedia Foundation has been continuously working on giving the European Roma community an independent voice, and has been facilitating self- representation of Romani communities in the Hungarian arts and media landscape ever since 1992.

It will stream panel discussions on its Facebook page as well, where filmmakers, activists and historians discuss the selected films to help audiences understand the importance and cultural context of each one better.

Romani filmmakers from ERIAC, Hungarian journalist and Romani human rights activist Ágnes Daróczi and Margareta Matache, professor or Harvard University will participate, moderated by Katalin Bársony of Romedia Foundation.

Katalin Bársony, Executive Director of the Romedia Foundation, said:

“The pandemic has made it all even harder for us, but we are not giving up. Because of how hard it has become to earn a steady income as a Romani creator in these times, and because the community is facing other challenges in the recent political climate, our organisation has decided to do something positive to bridge the enormous gap that not having real time cultural events has created, and put our yearly worn in an online mini festival format.

We feel responsible for creating media content by and about our community. It is our mission to empower Roma creators, including young Romani women, and to show a true side of the community to majority society, and help bridge gaps that way.

It is possible to overcome stereotypes through presenting unique stories to a wide audience, and this is where the power of art and film can help us. Through documentaries, feature films and unique, individual stories, we aim to change the way people think. We believe that positive self-representation can change in attitude can lead to amazing changes in society, even on the legislative level.”

Films:

The festival will open with Roz Mortimer’s film The Deathless Woman. It is a haunting ghost story for the 21st century that combines fictional and documentary elements to present a great overview of the hardships faced throughout Roma history. The Human Rights Film Days provide an opportunity for the Hungarian premiere of the film on 10 December, at 07:00 PM (CET)

“The Deathless Woman a beautifully filmed and fantastical re-imagining of the history of the Roma people. Spanning 77 years from the murder of a Roma matriarch by Nazi soldiers in a forest in Poland in 1942 to the rise of the far-right in contemporary Europe, Mortimer’s dark thriller takes us on an intense journey led by the ghost of the matriarch and a character based on the filmmaker herself. This hybrid documentary combines first-person witness testimony with Mortimer’s unique brand of re-enactment. Mortimer hand-builds all of her sets – from the burnt birch forest of the Deathless Woman’s grave in Poland, to a scale model of the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, to the underwater aftermath of a Nazi massacre in Hungary. Eight years in the making, THE DEATHLESS WOMAN is an elegiac and urgent film. A ghost story for the 21st Century.”

Among the screened films is How was Man Created?, in the children’s section, part of Kecskemét film’s great series Gypsy Tales. The animated film will be shown with original Hungarian dub and English subtitles. “When God created the heavens, the earth, and the waters, he was very pleased. But after a while, he felt lonely. He has thought and started to knead the clay, ignite the furnace, and set to form a man…”

Join the FB event:

https://www.facebook.com/events/3366799826752434