Anti-gypsyism, intergenerational conflict, and intersectional dilemmas in the films of Laura Halilovic

ABSTRACT

As the daughter of immigrants, a member of Italy’s most maligned ethnic minority, and raised in a strict patriarchal culture, film-maker Laura Halilovic provides a distinctive perspective on the stigmatization of Romanies in Italy and demonstrates a complex understanding of her own position within her tradition-bound community. This article analyses the tensions that emerge in the configuration of the central female figure in her 2009 documentary Lo, la mia famiglia rom e Woody Allen (Me, My Romani Family and Woody Allen), and autobiographically inspired 2014 feature film Lo rom romantica (Me, A Romantic Romani Woman). Whereas the documentary can be read as a personal expression of political protest, the feature film is less explicitly confrontational. Constructing an intimate portrait of a social group that is racialized and ostracized by the dominant population, both films explore dilemmas that cut across issues of ethnicity, citizenship, gender, and generation.

KEYWORDS:

• Italy
• Romanies
• anti-gypsyism
• racialization
• gender
• cinema

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Alongside Halilovic, the second-generation film-makers who have directed commercially distributed feature films at this juncture are Phaim Bhuyiam, Suranga Deshapriya Katugampala, Hleb Papou, and Haider Rashid. Among them, only Rashid has directed more than one feature. A small number of second-generation documentary film-makers, the best known of whom is Fred Kuwornu, have also been active over the past ten years in exploring the circumstances of immigrants, post-migrants, and diasporic subjects living in Italy. This group includes a cluster of second-generation women, including Medhin Paolos, Sabrina Onana, and Ariam Tekle, who have directed or co-directed incisive films that have not yet attained widespread distribution. For a detailed account of Italy’s audiovisual engagement with the seconde generazioni and the achievements of these film-makers, see Leonardo De Franceschi (2018).

2. Another group habitually described by Italians as “nomads” are the Caminanti, a semi-itinerant community based in Sicily for several centuries, whose historical origins are unclear. Having experienced discrimination similar to that experienced by the Roma and Sinti, the Caminanti are now included in all national initiatives for Romani inclusiveness (with the designation “Roma, Sinti and Caminanti”). The Caminanti, however, do not identify themselves as members of the Romani population, do not claim a shared history, and do not know the Romani language.

3. The struggle to attain citizenship for second-generation Italians is central to Fred Kuwornu’s (2011) documentary 18 Ius soli and Haider Rashid’s (2013) feature Sta per piovere.

4. Thirty years after the end of World War II, Bompiani published the memoir of an Italian Romani, Giuseppe Levakovich (Levakovich and Ausenda 1975), revealing the deplorable treatment of Roma and Sinti by Italians during the fascist regime and the Nazi occupation, facts that had long faded from public memory. Based on Levakovich’s conversations with Giorgio Ausenda, the book also narrates his experiences as a member of the armed Resistance. More recently, Santino Spinelli (2016), a Romani scholar, writer, and musician, has described in greater detail the horrors endured by Roma and Sinti during the same period, offering a thorough analysis of the genocidal implications of fascist anti-gypsyism, and naming several Italian Romanies who joined the partisan Resistance.

5. The first such settlement began to develop along the banks of Turin’s Stura river in 2000. Eventually known as the Barcaiola or the Platz, it grew to accommodate about 2000 people and was considered the largest informal Romani camp in Europe. Without access to electricity or running water, this rat-infested location was the only housing available to many families with school-going children, most of them Romanian nationals, who continued to live there despite police raids, fires, public protests, and other disruptions. Beginning in late 2014, it was razed to the ground by the municipal authorities, its residents rehoused, deported, or rendered homeless. Life in the camp during the final months of its existence is the subject of the evocative documentary I ricordi del fiume (River Memories) by Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio (2015).

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Áine O’Healy

Áine O’Healy is professor of modern languages and literatures at Loyola Marymount University. The author of Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame (2019), she is also co-editor with Katarzyna Marciniak and Anikó Imre of Transnational Feminism in Film and Media (2011) and a special issue of Feminist Media Studies titled “Transcultural Mediations and Transnational Politics of Difference” (2009).