AN alleyway off Victoria Road in the Southside of Glasgow , in the premises of community cycling organisation Bike for Good (South), is an unlikely place for a film festival. Yet here it was last weekend that CineRoma, the UK’s first-ever festival of films by and about Roma people, was held.
Co-hosted by the Southside Film Festival and Roma community organisation Romano Lav, the festival was due to take its place as an outdoor event in Queen’s Park during the Govanhill International Festival and Carnival in August.
Almost inevitably, however, the Scottish weather put the kibosh on that plan, and so the Roma film festival was rescheduled safely indoors for late September.
CineRoma was a vibrant and successful event, in which enthusiastic audiences of Roma and non-Roma people enjoyed not only a fascinatingly diverse series of movies, but also Roma food and music. When I meet Rahela Cirpaci, a young woman from Govanhill’s Roma community and a leading light in Romano Lav, she explains the significance of the festival. “It’s very important for young people within the Roma community, because we selected the films,” she says.
The five movies on the programme, including Our School (a 2011 documentary about three Roma children in Romania who are involved in a project to desegregate their school) and Taikon (a Swedish documentary from 2015 about the life of the great Roma activist and author Katarina Taikon), were selected by a panel of young people from the Govanhill Roma community.
Not only did the young people select the films, Cirpaci explains, but they also made their own trailers explaining their selections. It was a question, she says, of young Roma people “taking control of their own representation”. This question of representation is massively important for Roma people. Marginalised and persecuted over centuries in Europe, the Roma are subjected to the most thoroughgoing racist stereotyping.
Originating from northern India, the Roma people are believed to have migrated from India around 1500 years ago and arrived in Europe at least 900 years ago.
Their long history of being shunned and oppressed in Europe reached its genocidal nadir during the Nazi Holocaust, in which, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights estimates, at least half-a-million Roma people were murdered – an appalling figure, given that the current Roma population in Europe is estimated at around 10 million.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the young people on the CineRoma selection panel chose the 2009 film Korkoro for the festival. The work of French-Roma filmmaker Tony Gatlif, it is a beautiful, vibrant, heartbreaking movie about a Roma family trying to survive in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War.
The film is a celebration of Roma culture and of the solidarity of members of the French Resistance. It is also a powerful indictment not only of German Nazism, but also of the French fascist-collaborationist Vichy regime which interned many thousands of Roma in concentration camps.
Gorgeously rich in its colour palette, the movie contrasts the expressive liberty (the word “korkoro” means “freedom” in the Romany language) with the brutal order and the pernicious, murderous racial politics of those ruling France in those dark days.
When an officer in the Vichy secret police tells a Roma man that he is interning his family because he wishes to rid France of its “vermin”, one is reminded not only of the genocidal, anti-Roma rhetoric of the increasingly mainstream far-right in eastern Europe, but also of the hate speech of Italy’s would-be prime minister Matteo Salvini, who recently denounced a Roma woman as a “dirty gypsy”.
Gatlif’s film is very much a movie for our times. It will also have carried a powerful resonance for those Roma and non-Roma who had the good fortune to hear Raymond Gureme speak in Govanhill in June of this year.
Gureme, a French-Roma activist and hero of the French Resistance, escaped from nine concentration camps during the Second World War. Now in his mid-90s, he travels internationally, speaking to Roma and Traveller communities and their supporters, spreading his message of resistance to racism and fascism.
Elsewhere on the CineRoma programme was An Episode In The Life Of An Iron Picker, an award-winning Bosnian film from 2013. Directed by Danis Tanovic, the film tells the true story of Senada Alimanovic, a Bosnian-Roma woman denied medical treatment following a miscarriage on the grounds that she had neither a health insurance card nor money to pay for a life-saving operation.
Starring Alimanovic herself, alongside her now late husband Nazif Mujic (the “iron picker” of the title), the film opens a window on to the dreadful social exclusion and poverty faced by Roma communities in countries throughout Europe. At the same time, it is an impressive depiction of solidarity, both within a particular Roma family and the wider Roma community.
THE final selection in the festival programme was a fascinating one. Set in a poor suburb of Madrid, Arantxa Echevarria’s 2018 film Carmen & Lola tells the story of the love affair between two young Roma women in their late teens.
The movie delves powerfully into the crisis the relationship represents, both for the young lesbian couple and for the largely evangelical Christian Roma community.
Depicting conflicts both within and between generations, it is an excellent film, and a brave choice for a young selection committee which admits to having felt conflicted about screening the movie, but decided to do so precisely because it was controversial.
The fact that CineRoma is the UK’s first Roma film festival, and only the third in Europe, speaks volumes about the tremendous progress that has been made in Govanhill in recent years. The Govanhill International Festival and Carnival, of which it is an off-shoot, only began in 2017, but already it is an established part of the cultural calendar of the Southside of Glasgow.
Fatima Uygun, manager of the Govanhill Baths Community Trust, has been a pioneer of the event. During the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of Rock Against Racism (the series of music carnivals and demonstrations set up to counter the racism of the fascist National Front) in 2016, Uygun and other community activists discussed setting up something similar in Govanhill.
“For us at Govanhill Baths the arts have always played a very important role in mobilising and uniting people,” she says, “so it made sense for us to celebrate the diversity in the community from a cultural perspective.
“We established the carnival in the hope that it would be a bit of an antidote to the levels of racism that existed locally. We wanted to promote the contribution that migrants have made to Govanhill, and to Glasgow more broadly.”
From the outset that meant Govanhill’s relatively recently established Roma community had a visible presence, both within the festival’s cultural output and on its much-loved carnival parade. As Rahela Cirpaci explains, the Govanhill Carnival is “a big thing” for the Glasgow Roma community.
“We take part in it every year. It’s a chance for everyone to come together and take part in the parade. We help to organise it as well, which is very important to the community, because not a lot of Roma people are involved in big events, parades and festivals. This gives them a chance to participate and be part of a wider community.”
Uygun herself is a long-standing Glasgow resident who was raised in Australia in a Turkish family. She is delighted by the way that the Roma, as well as many other ethnic and national groups within Govanhill’s diverse community, have embraced events such as the festival and carnival and CineRoma.
There is certainly a lot of diversity to celebrate. Govanhill is the most ethnically diverse community in the UK outside of London. No fewer than 46 languages are spoken by more than 50 ethnic groups.
With that cultural richness, however, come high levels of poverty. As Uygun points out, long before the current Roma, Polish and Kurdish communities became established in Govanhill, there were migrant communities from the Indian sub-continent and, before that, large Jewish and Irish communities. All of them encountered great economic challenges and all of them faced prejudice and racism.
As a young Roma woman and community activist, Cirpaci is an important part of the next chapter in Govanhill’s remarkable story. Born in Belgium, she lived in various parts of Ireland between the ages of two and 19.
She tells me that she never experienced in Ireland the kind of support networks of Roma and cross-community groups that exist in Govanhill. This is something you hear a lot from young Roma people in the Southside of Glasgow.
Our nation still faces undeniable problems of racism; for instance, someone scrawled “migrants go home” on the Govanhill Baths building just days before I interviewed Cirpaci and Uygun. However, the positive testimonies coming from the Roma community suggest that “One Scotland. Many Cultures” is certainly more than just a slogan.
CineRoma screened a short documentary made by young Roma people in Govanhill. It includes footage from the annual International Roma Day celebrations in the community.
A speech made there by a young Roma man offers, perhaps, the clearest evidence of the positive community work that has been done on the Southside of Glasgow by and with these proud, but also terribly marginalised and stigmatised, peoples.
“I was only a boy [in the Czech Republic],” he said, “but, from my own experience, life [for Roma people] in eastern Europe is much more difficult than here in the UK.
"I love Scotland, I love Govanhill. Govanhill is my home, and I feel like I’m not only a Czech-Roma, I feel like I am a Czech-Scottish-Roma.”
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here