Romani migration and cinematic representation
The enlargement of the European Union, which since recently includes Roma-rich countries like Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, led to the official recognition of the Roma as Europe’s most sizable ethnic minority. Immigration officials, both in the East and in the West, anxiously monitor for signs of the increased Roma traffic that tabloid-style media loudly predicted. The prevalent European rhetoric may be of abolition of borders, yet the Roma, whose culture is supposedly recognized as inherently migratory and itinerant, face up to double standards and multiple other barriers.
Gypsy images are a precious asset in the metaphoric assortment of European exoticisms. However, the actual movements of ethnic Roma across Fortress Europe (which they no longer need to infiltrate from outside) causes panic among the guardians of the realm who treat them, wherever they can, as people who clearly do not belong. It is a two-fold reaction, depending in which direction the alleged movement takes place: seen from the West Roma arrivals are regarded as a dreaded invasion which is quietly but methodically rebuffed; seen from the East, Roma departures are quietly welcomed as a relief but also feared because, one dreads, resentment towards the Roma may spread by association and affect the whole population of their countries of origin.
The BBC documentary What Magdalena Said (Michael Stewart, 1994) shows a Roma family who have left for Slovakia at the time of Czechoslovakia’s split. Having decided to return to their Czech home some months later, they are no longer wanted and face homelessness and statelessness. The clerks in the local council preposterously apply selective regulations and are prepared to go at great lengths if they could only get rid of these unwanted fellow-citizens. The Czech female bureaucrats would happily make these helpless women wander back and forth in search of abode and would gladly send them on the road to nowhere, not because the Roma women want to be drifters but because contemporary immigrant policies enable immigration officials to turn them into nomads. In Gelem, Gelem (1992 Rhizomfilm) there is an ominous scene where Dutch guards on the border with Belgium undertake it to physically remove a group of Roma women and children from a room where they are sheltered temporarily while seeking admission. It all comes down to a rude physical elimination of unwanted bodies that are piled together in this room.
Not that this way of dealing with the Roma as annoying parasites is anything new. Looking back into Holocaust history, Katrin Seybold and Melanie Spitta’s now classical documentary Das falsche Wort (The False Word, 1987) calmly narrates the story of this enduring bigotry. The film not only chronicles the systematic racially-motivated rounding up and demise of the Roma and Sinti German populations. Its most important achievement is in the dispassionate chronicling of the continuous discrimination and systematic selective unfairness applied to Roma Holocaust survivors after the war throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. At a time when other groups are given proper acknowledgment and compensation for the persecution afflicted on them, the suffering of Roma survivors is systematically diminished, their damages claims are turned down, and many are left to perish in poverty in post-WWII democratic Germany.
Present-day Roma destitution in some parts of Central Eastern and South Eastern Europe is an unsightly picture, as recorded in films by directors like Želimir Žilnik or Goran Radovanović; the commonly shared reaction of politicians is to shut it out of view. The mayor of the Czech town Ústi nad Labem even wanted to hide all the Roma behind the wall that the city was planning to build to separate the town from the ghetto. Britain also had its way to keep the Roma out of sight behind the invisible wall of British immigrations ‘pre-screenings’ of passengers landing on flights to London carried out at the airport in Prague in the early 2000s. As if accidentally, mostly Roma were singled out and barred from flying to the UK. Germany engaged in a different practice, organising a deportation campaign of Roma refugees from former Yugoslavia back into Serbia, thus effectively not only shutting them out of sight but also engaging in active racial segregation by sending them to territories outside the European Union. Documented in Žilnik’s Kenedi Returns Home (Serbia, 2003) some of these deportees are shown on the morning of their arrival in wintry Belgrade (pictured). After a decade-long sojourn in Germany they have been pulled out of bed in the small hours of the morning, loaded onto a plane and sent ‘back home.’ The immigration squad has broken into their flats with no warning, on a false pretence of emergency, no chance of appeal or contest the extradition. Even Roma that have settled successfully are forcefully turned into homeless outcasts; a German immigration official admits that his is a ‘shitty work.’
All over Europe filmmakers keep churning out scripts featuring stories of exuberant Roma. All over Europe unwanted Roma populations are on the move; some are struggling to get themselves to a better life while others are being deported in the context of illicitly executed law enforcement campaigns. One welcomes the images while barring the actual people. The striking failure to reconcile actual and metaphoric Gypsies persists.
©Dina Iordanova
1 July 2008