When I was a boy, my parents were telling me that in order to stay safe, I need to avoid Roma people. As they were explaining to me, they would kidnap me and sell me into slavery.
At the basketball court and playground in front of our building, the very building I am still living in, there were several Roma boys and girls. They were a lot older than me and we all played together. Yes, there were some incidents and fights amongst all of us, but I can't recall I've ever had problems being safe. There were some violent boys but I always attributed that to problematic upbringing and their social status: they were raised in poor and dysfunctional families.
This film offers fantastic, colorful, stunning, absolutely vivid representation of cultural values and aesthetics of Roma people along with tragedy of their existence. What Petrovic succeeded is to create almost unbearable heaviness of being (yes, the complete opposite of Kaufman's almost similar titled masterpiece). And just when you think of, or rather try to find any hope for protagonists, there is another darkness and tragedy waiting behind the corner. It seems that life of a majority of Roma people, everywhere in the world, is constant struggle against social stigma, prejudice, poverty (which is the output of social exclusion). Than again, those are the very problems other nations/people are facing, too. Which is strange as we are enjoying much higher levels of education, freedom, technology and such. It is obvious that 'Great promise' which followed Industrial Revolution didn't brought what we expected; great happiness for most of the people, unlimited personal freedom, technological advance available to everyone.
Yet, with all those centuries-old problems, Roma people seems much more alive than most of 'us', Western people/nations. Being 'trapped' in poverty and inhumane living conditions, they are living without limits, experiencing strong basic emotions on an everyday basis, constantly trying to overcome their harsh reality.
