PRINCES AMONGST MEN: THE GYPSY FILM FESTIVAL!

FEATURE FILMS AND DOCUMENTARIES
ALONGSIDE A PHOTO EXHIBITION, LIVE MUSIC & DJS OVER TWO WEEK-ENDS!

www.myspace.com/princesamongstmen2007

April 24-25-26 @ The Ritzy, Brixton

May 1-2-3 @ The Picture House, Greenwich

This festival was conceived by Garth Cartwright after his book, Princes Amongst Men: Journeys With Gypsy Musicians (Serpents Tail) was published in 2005 and readers’ began enquiring as to how they could get to see the various feature films and documentaries he described. Since then lost classic feature films, brand new feature films and many documentaries have been screened. Directors, cinephiles and Roma rights activists have participated and the Ritzy’s upstairs bar has been transformed into a Gypsy-flavoured party across the weekend.

For 2009 the Festival continues with a rich offering of past classics and brilliant new material. The Ritzy also hosts FREE live music on Saturday and Sunday night in the upstairs bar and a PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION of an Albanian Roma community by Australian photojournalist Rob Hackman.

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THE RITZY BRIXTON Friday 24th, Saturday 25th, Sunday 26th APRIL
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FRIDAY 9pm: LATCHO DROM (film)
Directed by Tony Gatlif, this beautiful 1993 feature follows the musical migration of the Romany people from Rajasthan to Andalucia. Celebrated as a classic of world cinema, Latcho Drom is a haunting, visionary film.

+ post-screening Princes Amongst Men DJ event @ Ritzy upstairs Bar

SATURDAY afternoon 4.10pm: GYPSY MUSIC EXTRAVAGANZA (vintage live footage)
Vintage TV (Esma Redzepova, Gabby Lunca) live performances (Fanfare Ciocarlia), Guca festival footage and Bulgaria's Azis. Ranges from the ‘60s to ‘00s: a variety of short documentaries including 1960s footage of Esma Redzepova, 1970s Romanian TV footage of Bygone Age stars, contemporary footage from Serbia’s Guca festival, Bulgaria’s gay Gypsy pop-folk icon Azis and other footage; most never before screened in the UK before.

SATURDAY evening 6.45pm: PRETTY DYANA: A GYPSY RECYCLING SAGA & CYMBALOM LEGACY (documentaries)

Roma documentaries Pretty Dyana: A Gypsy Recycling Saga (Serbia) & Cymbalom Legacy (Holland-Hungary 45 mins) are acclaimed, brilliant award winning documentaries! Pretty Dyana finds director Boris Mitic investigating how Roma families that fled ethnic cleansing in Kosovo have built Mad Max-like vehicles from old Yugoslav Dyana cars and employ them to recycle Belgrade’s trash. It is both hilarious and life-affirming – a Balkan Slumdog! Cymbalom Legacy focuses on virtuoso Hungarian cymbalom player Miklos Lukacs. Beautifully shot and recorded by director Mano Camon, Cymbalom Legacy offers up both a history of the cymbalom and the life story of Lukacs, a young Roma musician dedicated to crossing boundaries.

+ post-screenings live music @ Ritzy upstairs Bar with French singer-guitarist FLORENCE JOELLE, accompanied by accordionist-keyboard LUCIE REJCHRTOVA, performing a blend of jazz, blues and Romany songs (Princes Amongst Men DJ support).

SUNDAY afternoon 4.30pm: ROMA HUMAN RIGHTS EVENT (documentaries)
A variety of short documentaries from Turkey, Kosovo, Serbia, Bulgaria and the UK celebrating ROMA HUMAN RIGHTS.

**** British Gypsy activist and film maker Jake Bowers will present several shorts he has directed on the UK Gypsy-Traveller community*****

SUNDAY evening 7.00pm: I EVEN MET HAPPY GYPSIES + CHILDREN OF THE BRASS BAND (film)

A very rare screening of the classic 1960s Yugoslav film I EVEN MET HAPPY GYPSIES. This brilliant, disturbing feature is rated as one of the great European films of the 1960s, helped launch Yugoslavia's "black cinema" movement and inspired Kusturica’s Gypsy epics. Supported by THE CHILDREN OF THE BRASS BAND VILLAGE, a witty and engaging 15-minute documentary that shows how ancient musical traditions continue to exist in southern Serbia.

+ post-film screenings live music @ Ritzy upstairs Bar with klezmer duo THE MATZOH BOYS (PAM DJ support).

RITZY PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION

A photographic exhibition of an Albanian Roma community by Australian photojournalist Rob Hackman will hang in the Ritzy's downstairs bar across April.

Hackman writes, “After emerging from 50 years of isolated communist rule the people of Albania were encouraged to invest their savings and houses in a huge pyramid scheme. An estimated $2 billion was lost when these government endorsed schemes collapsed in 1997. Today many in Albaniastruggle to rebuild their lives.

This collection of images depict the lives of a small group of Roma living in the wake of this huge financial crash.” All prints will be for sale with profit going back to this Roma community.

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THE PICTURE HOUSE GREENWICH Friday 1st, Saturday 2nd, Sunday 3rd MAY
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FRIDAY 6.45pm: LATCHO DROM (film)
Directed by Tony Gatlif, this beautiful 1993 feature follows the musical migration of the Romany people from Rajasthan to Andalucia. Celebrated as a classic of world cinema, Latcho Drom is a haunting, visionary film.

SATURDAY evening 6.45pm: PRETTY DYANA: A GYPSY RECYCLING SAGA & CYMBALOM LEGACY (documentaries)

Roma documentaries Pretty Dyana: A Gypsy Recycling Saga (Serbia) & Cymbalom Legacy (Holland-Hungary 45 mins) are acclaimed, brilliant award winning documentaries! Pretty Dyana finds director Boris Mitic investigating how Roma families that fled ethnic cleansing in Kosovo have built Mad Max-like vehicles from old Yugoslav Dyana cars and employ them to recycle Belgrade’s trash. It is both hilarious and life-affirming – a Balkan Slumdog! Cymbalom Legacy focuses on virtuoso Hungarian cymbalom player Miklos Lukacs. Beautifully shot and recorded by director Mano Camon, Cymbalom Legacy offers up both a history of the cymbalom and the life story of Lukacs, a young Roma musician dedicated to crossing boundaries.

SUNDAY afternoon 4pm: ROMA HUMAN RIGHTS EVENT (documentaries)
A variety of short documentaries from Turkey, Kosovo, Serbia, Bulgaria and the UK celebrating ROMA HUMAN RIGHTS.

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THE RITZY, BRIXTON Box Office: 08707 550
Coldharbour Lane, London, SW2 1JG
Nearest tube: Brixton (Victoria Line), 3 minutes walk
www.picturehouses.co.uk/site/cinemas/ritzy/local.htm

GREENWICH PICTURE HOUSE Box Office: 08707 55 00 65
180 Greenwich High Road , Greenwich, London, SE10 8NN
British Rail is five minutes walk
www.picturehouses.co.uk/site/cinemas/Greenwich/local.html

Merriam native Julie Denesha photographs Gypsy life in Slovakia

By ALICE THORSON
The Kansas City Star

Within days of beginning work as a staff photographer at the Prague Post in the Czech Republic, Julie Denesha was warned by her colleagues: “You have to watch out for the Gypsies.”

“They’re criminals; they don’t want to work,” was the common refrain.

These stereotypes and the general feeling of resentment against the Roma, as many Gypsies call themselves, set off Denesha’s internal alarm.

“It was the same stuff you hear about any minority group,” the Merriam native said, surrounded by 45 photographs from her “Gypsies of Slovakia” exhibit, now at the Landon Gallery on Southwest Boulevard.

Slovakia’s half-million Roma are the country’s second largest minority after Hungarians.

Denesha’s images offer an intimate picture of Roma life.

Women prepare meals, children play, men weave baskets and chop wood in decrepit apartment buildings and dilapidated rural shacks without benefit of basic city services such as running water and garbage pickup.

“We all walk around with these ideas about other people,” Denesha (pronounced den-i-SHAY) said. “The truth is far more interesting.”

By 2003, when she began her Roma series, Denesha had covered the war in Kosovo and done extensive reporting on Central and Eastern Europe for The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, Newsweek and other publications. She also had gained some familiarity with Roma culture from freelance assignments.

Every couple of years a publication would send her to a Roma settlement for half a day to do a story on the life and conditions of these “outsiders,” who trace their origins to northwestern India and are darker skinned than ethnic Slovaks. Many were killed in Nazi concentration camps.

“I always felt I was missing something,” Denesha said.

She decided that the only way to get at the “truth” was to live among the Roma.

With a grant from the Puffin Foundation, she lived with Roma families for four months in 2003, when Slovakia was poised to join the European Union.

The goal, she said, was “to disappear into the rhythms of life and see the people rather than the poverty.”

Denesha held out hope that the requirements of EU membership would translate into better treatment and conditions for the Roma, but in 2007, when she returned for six more months with funding from a Fulbright and a Milena Jesenska Fellowship, she found little had changed.

Although her images do not ignore the hardships and squalor of the settlements, their focus is the close-knit Roma family.

“The family builds the home together,” Denesha said.

Typically a daughter-in-law moves in and learns from her husband’s mother.

What surprised her, Denesha said, was how much the woman’s role in the household is valued and respected in Roma culture.

An image of a little boy watching as his grandmother, mother and aunt prepare a meal captures a common domestic routine.

“They’re very interested in sharing recipes,” Denesha said. “They’d cook from scratch these amazing things.”

Another image shows a man chopping wood in the village of Rakusy, where wood-burning stoves are the only source of heat in the settlement’s log cabins.

In her months with the Roma, Denesha was keenly attuned to moments of joy. One striking image shows teenagers dancing on an apartment balcony strung with laundry. Another captures little boys swarming over an abandoned car that their parents would take apart and sell for metal.

One of the most captivating shots shows two little girls walking down a forest path with a bucket of kindling. The kerchiefs on their heads are actually “pants with zip-off legs that they made into cool hats,” Denesha said.

Outside the settlements, life is difficult for Roma children. They speak Roma at home but must learn to speak Slovak in the Slovak schools they attend. When the language barrier causes them to fall behind, they are placed in special schools for slow learners, where most of the children are Roma.

Denesha’s Roma images also provide a fascinating glimpse of life after communism in Eastern and Central Europe.

“I’m fascinated with the old communist empire,” she said. “I came of age in the 1980s when Russia was the Evil Empire. I’m always skeptical of what people say is bad.”

The story of Nicholas and Alexandra (Russia’s last imperial family, murdered by the Bolsheviks), fired Denesha’s imagination when she read it in junior high.

Her fascination with Russia continued at the University of Kansas, where she graduated in 1993 with degrees in journalism and Russian language and literature.

After graduation she worked as a staff photographer for The Kansas City Star for two years before moving to Prague.

With the collapse of the Communist regime and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the mid-’90s were a time of economic turmoil and widespread unemployment. The Roma were hit particularly hard, Denesha said.

Tough economic times heightened resentment of the Roma people. In the 1990s they frequently were targets of violence.

Denesha documented the bloody aftermath of one attack that took place in 2000 in a suburb of Zilina. A mother intervened — and subsequently died from her injuries — when two intruders broke into her home and began beating her daughters with baseball bats.

“There’s so much misunderstanding that they’re not really seeing each other,” she said of the relationship between ethnic Slovaks and the Roma. “I wanted to create a window.”

In each village Denesha would meet with the Gypsy mayor, or vajda, before she began taking photographs.

“I can do this project,” she would say.

“I can’t promise change, but this is my hope.”

ON EXHIBIT

The show: “Gypsies of Slovakia”: Documentary Photography by Julie Denesha

Where: Landon Gallery/Sabrina Staires Studio, 329 Southwest Blvd.

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday- Friday and by appoint- ment. The exhibit has been extended through Nov. 2.

How much: Free

For more information: 816-474-4771 or www.juliedenesha.com

Faces from the fringe

Green Bay photographer's trip to Slovakia opened her world to plight of Roma 'gypsies'

By Thomas Rozwadowski
trozwado@greenbaypressgazette.com

A year ago, Slovakia was nothing more than a name on a map to Tina Bechtel.

Now the country has faces. Faces that remain nameless, but ones that stared intently while pressed up against the other end of her digital camera because they didn't know what it meant to have their picture taken.

As Bechtel walks through her "Gypsies (Roma) of Slovakia" photo exhibit at the ARTgarage in Green Bay, she points to the face of a young, married woman looking too childlike to be holding her own malnourished baby.

Another is of a father happily embracing his child.

Although they were reluctant to acknowledge her presence, Bechtel began snapping photos of four men standing against a wall and approached them with reserve so they could see the finished product. The man, who had never seen himself in a photo before, graciously requested a picture of his young daughter.

There are the signs of poverty and hospitality Bechtel noted, like the out-of-place satellite dish propped next to hanging laundry, piles of garbage and an outhouse. Or the way several boys began playing a Casio keyboard and dancing spontaneously for her. Or children becoming overjoyed at the sight of visitors in their settlement.

There are the gut-wrenching inequities — most notably, driving back to a hotel in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava and eating a nice dinner after seeing the poverty of the Roma people, better known to Americans as gypsies.

"No running water. No septic. No heat," said Bechtel, a local artist based in Door County. "At the worst one, houses were put together with whatever material they could find.

"I couldn't imagine living there. I don't know how they survive."

(MORE)

‘Gypsy Fire' burns in photos by Onan, Aydın

A photography exhibition titled "Roma in İstanbul: Gypsy Fire," depicting the daily lives and tragedies of the Roma in İstanbul's Sulukule and Dolapdere districts, is on display at the Tütün Deposu (Tobacco Warehouse) in Tophane, one of the venues of the ongoing ULISphotoFEST ‘07.
The exhibit, which features documentary-style photographs by Timurtaş Onan and Yunus Emre Aydın, runs through July 4.

Out of the gypsy caravan

By Indian Express
Tuesday January 2, 11:52 PM

The gypsies are back. A girl is admiring herself in the mirror. An impish boy is peeking up a skirt. Without flamenco music and swinging skirts, the Roma just peer at you - from within the frames of Zsuzsanna Ardo's photographs. Sometimes, they have their faces turned away.
Black-and-white photographs may seem like an odd choice to capture the life of the colourful Roma but Ardo, Hungarian writer and photographer, is not keen on the exotic. She zooms in on the ordinariness of Europe's largest ethnic community. But the focus is soft, Ardo's eye sensitive.
"These are the moments that touched me," she says. The idea was not to depict the economic misery of the Roma but the way they live, the light as well as the serious moments they encounter." But the intent of the exhibition is serious. Called "The Roma Decade", it refers to the Decade of Roma Inclusion 2005-15, a commitment by some European governments to combat the Roma's poverty and exclusion.

Seeing the Roma up-close was not easy, though. Over the last two summers, as Ardo wandered in Budapest and by the Danube, they often kept away. "Some were suspicious, but eventually most of them allowed me to picture a slice of their lives," she says. The Roma, who were hounded in Europe, are a disillusioned lot. Amid all their inherited bohemianism, they see the greyness that Ardo has captured. But things are changing. "They are adapting themselves to global developments," says Ardo.

The free-spirited gypsies may still scoff at something called home but for those known to have descended from India, who have a chakra as their symbol and who would call out rani and gav in their musical Romany language, this is homecoming. Even if it is in black and white.
The exhibition will travel to the UK and Turkey.

The exhibition at the India International Centre ends on January 3.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/070102/48/6armg.html