Too Gypsy for Czech Roma NGOs?

3. 3. 2010 / Jan Čulík

This short film by Dominika Švecová was done two years ago as a student work for a Edinburgh College of Art's Film School class. Originally it was not supposed to be longer than three minutes, but in the end it became a six-minute, deeply empathetic, slightly ironic, although sympathizing with, in an almost heroic portrait of Iveta, a Gypsy 40 years old dominant mother and her Slovak-Roma family, which nowadays live in Scotland's Glasgow.

I like how this film successfully seizes, in a clever short way, the humanity of the persons it covers, showing, with understanding, how much we have together with them.

This document was chosen for last year's "Scottish shorts" at the prestigious Edinburgh International Film Festival. The audience in the full movie theatre audibly reacted to some of the scenes, sometimes laughing at what they were seeing.

A note from Dominika's tutors from the Edinburgh College of Art caught me: "In this film is, among other things, how those Roma people are proud about themselves, for how they are in a much better situation than in their homeland, Slovakia" (Yes, in Slovakia the whole family regularly starved, while after coming to Scotland the children had problems ingesting food, because they thew up all the time, taking a couple of weeks until they could eat normally.) "At the same time they are unbelievably poor", she added.

The short film was offered to some Roma rights NGOs in the Czech Republic, they declined -- supposedly it is "too Gyspsy". Basically it seems that for pro-Roma organizations an authentic protrait of a Gypsy family is acceptable and welcome only if it shows them acting like white caucasian Czechs... :)

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