Southside Film Festival and Romano Lav are delighted to present CineRoma, the UK’s first Roma film festival, over the weekend of 3rd-4th August in Queen’s Park Arena.
Southside Film Festival has worked with Govanhill based Roma charity Romano Lav’s youth group to select a programme of award-winning films from around the world along with UK premieres.
At the launch event on Saturday 3rd August, Romano Lav and Southside Film will discuss the significance of a Roma film festival and the role of cinema in promoting Roma culture, and will screen a short film made by the Romano Lav youth group to launch CineRoma. This will be followed by the feature film Korkoro, a cinematic tribute to the Roma killed in the Holocaust and an ode to life lived freely.
There are a further four screenings on Sunday 4th August, including: Our School, a touching story shot over four years following a group of Roma children involved in a school desegregation project and the moving documentary, and Taikon, about one of the most important and inspiring advocates of human rights in 20th Century Europe, a Roma woman called Katarina Taikon.
This will be followed by An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, a deeply moving portrayal of family and love under crushing institutional racism, which won the Gran Jury Prix at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2013. The festival closes with Carmen & Lola, a 2018 Spanish drama about two young Roma women who fall in love, incurring the wrath of their communities and turning their families against them.
Check out the programme
The full CineRoma Programme information is available on the Southside Film website.
All screenings take place in Queen’s Park Arena, are un-ticketed, and entry is by donation.
CineRoma is supported by Regional Screen Scotland’s Challenge Fund and is part of the Govanhill International Festival and Carnival 2019.
The festival follows on from the successful collaboration between Southside Film and Romano Lav during this year’s Southside Film Festival with a screening of the award-winning Black Cat, White Cat followed by music from Gypsy Lexus and traditional Roma food.
Ashli Mullen, Project Coordinator for Romano Lav says:
“We are thrilled to work with Southside Film to present CineRoma. We strongly believe that cinema has a crucial role to play in challenging stereotypes and promoting Roma culture. Through the process of creating this film festival, our young people have been exposed not only to new genres, mediums, and ways of seeing, but have been empowered to take control of their own representation, through a series of film-making workshops and the production of a documentary, as well as their innovative ‘living trailers’ for each film. Further, as we observed at our joint screening of ‘Black Cat, White Cat’ at the main Southside Film Festival in June, these events have the capacity not only to entertain and inspire, but to create space for the deepening of solidarities amongst our diverse local communities and the forging of new ones along the way. We look forward to further collaborations”.
Aileas Pringle, Southside Film’s CineRoma festival coordinator says:
“It is exciting to see such an important part of the Govanhill community acknowledged and represented on screen. Working on CineRoma has been a very enriching experience for us all, as we’ve discovered so many fantastic stories through selecting films for the programme. CineRoma is a great opportunity for the people of Govanhill, the wider Southside and whole city Glasgow to share these stories and to learn something new about the Roma community”.
