Still: A Modern Roma Fairytale - Raluca Lupaşcu

Filmmaker Raluca Lupaşcu is originally from Romania but has now been living in the Netherlands for over a decade. She studied documentary at the Dutch Film Academy, and around the time she graduated she met Iris Lammertsma, one of the founders of production company, WitFilm.

“I told her I was interested in making Balkan tragic comedies,” Lupaşcu recalls how she summed up her artistic ambitions. The producer was intrigued.

“I was very much obsessed with Emir Kusturica’s films like Black Cat, White Cat or Time of the Gypsies or Underground,” Lupaşcu further points out how strongly influenced she was by the work of the double Palme D’Or winning auteur. She wanted her own work to have a similar feeling,

“like something stuck in your throat and you have no idea whether you should laugh or you should cry. I wanted to bring that in documentaries.”

There is a flavour of Kusturica in Lupaşcu’s feature documentary A Modern Roma Fairytale* (a world premiere in IDFA’s Luminous section). “Seventy kilometres from where I was born in Vaslui, there is this beautiful Roma community with castles and a king,” she explains. “You can actually see the castles from the train.”

She tells how she had read stories in the press about Roma families living in homes with 22 rooms - and sometimes sharing them with their horses. She was intensely curious about this culture and about a community which lives entirely by its own rules, without making concessions to modernity or the outside world.

Her subjects are a Roma family living in a palace in eastern Romania. Regina is a teenager already preparing for marriage. Nicoleta is a mischievous 10-year-old girl. At 25, Anca is already the mother of three. They’re part of the family of a Roma ‘king’ but their opportunities in life are strictly limited. In this community, which sticks to its own traditions, women are expected to raise children and keep house while the men are the breadwinners.

Lupaşcu spent four years researching the project. She already knew what the title of the film would be, even before she found her subjects. One of her first steps was to call local mayors and ask them about the communities they represent. Eventually, through these officials, she was put in touch with some of the ‘kings’ of the Roma communities. She went to the castles of three of them, meeting their wives and daughters and talking at length with them.

When she finally chose a family, she “spent weeks inside their community, went on holidays with them, ate with them…we became super close.”

Two ‘grandmas’ feature in the film. By a strange coincidence, Lupaşcu had met one of them many years before on her own grandmother’s farm near the border with Moldova. The Roma lady had come to the farm to try to buy feathers to make pillows. “I remember that strong, dominant lady who came to negotiate with my grandmother - and always won the negotiations.”

The director has always been “obsessed with reading and fairy-tales.” She says now that the stories she read as a kid “had a very big influence on me - on my brain, my behaviour, on my dreams and on my expectations.” Her documentary includes references to Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. 

Lupaşcu was working with a small crew. She pays tribute to her cinematographer Jeroen Kiers for enabling her to portray the Roma community in such an intimate fashion. It wasn’t a straightforward shoot. Chaos was never far away. “Screaming kids, no nannies!” Although the director speaks Romanian, she doesn’t speak Rromani (Lupaşcu’s preferred spelling) - and so communication was sometimes a challenge.

The director eventually decided not to be in the same room as her DOP. Her presence would make them aware of the camera and they would immediately try to put on their best face and stop behaving naturally. During the two summers of shooting, she would therefore step out and watch from a monitor in a different room.

The Roma men in the documentary may seem macho and chauvinistic, but Lupaşcu saw more to them. “I had a very good relationship with the men. I wanted to focus on the women’s perspective but I understand the perspective of the men as well.”

She points out the men are undergoing the same indoctrination process as the women and being steeped in traditions that stretch back many generations. Besides, she adds, in France until 2006, women could get married as young as 15. The Roma approach to marriage is therefore not so far removed from that found elsewhere. She insists that most of the female characters in the documentary “are strong women and a source of inspiration.”

“Even without the chance of an education, they still seem to embark in a process of micro-emancipation to improve their condition,” she adds. “They find way to survive through singing, dancing and a sense of sisterhood.”

“But they are still holding to their traditions because they were so much persecuted in the past. Throughout the history, they went from nomads to slaves, and from slaves to victims of the Holocaust. You have to understand their culture to understand where their fight for survival and behaviour comes from. Sometimes, tradition was the only thing they could hold on to,” she further underlines.

When Lupaşcu was first pitching the project five years ago, the idea was to have teenager Regina as the main character. The trajectory of the project changed, partly because the characters were growing older and partly because it took a long time to complete the financing.

Verde Film will handle distribution in the Netherlands. A shorter version will be broadcast by Human. In the meantime, the director hopes to bring some of the protagonists to Amsterdam for the IDFA premiere. She is also preparing various new projects including one called Barefoot Happiness that is about “the pure happiness we experience as children, when we play freely in nature or with animals and each other.…”

Find out more about IDFA here.

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund