International Festival of Romani Film
17.–20.9.2026
Superstition is one of the oldest weapons used against Romani people. For centuries, the figure of the "mystical Gypsy" — fortune teller, curse-bringer, thief of children, keeper of secret magic — has been projected onto Roma and Sinti by those who never bothered to ask who they are and what their beliefs and gestures actually are. These images did not stay in fairy tales or folklore. They travelled into newspapers, into courtrooms, into the language of politicians, and they persist until this day.
This year, AKE DIKHEA? turns the lens back on the myth itself. Under the motto "Breaking the Spell", the festival poses the question: who benefits when a people is treated as mysterious rather than human? What happens when Romani filmmakers take a stereotype that was built to exoticise and frighten, and reclaim it, meaning to bend it, mock it, dismantle it, or fill it with real memory instead of projection?
Superstition works by keeping its subject unknowable. It thrives on distance. Film does the opposite: it brings the audience close, into a home, a family, into a lived life, where no myth survives contact with the particular. That is the quiet power our program holds this year: stories that refuse to be symbols, told by the people the symbols were made about.
Our films this year move in both directions. Some confront the old stereotype head-on, taking a myth built to frighten and turning it back on those who invented it. Others go inward, toward the rituals, warnings, and quiet magic that Romani families still live by — not as something to be embarrassed of or explained away, but as a form of knowledge with its own logic, its own care, its own truth.
Breaking the Spell, in this sense, is not the opposite of dreaming. It may be one of its oldest forms.
As always, we remain committed to intersectionality: superstition does not fall on all Romani people equally. Our selection continues to make room for Romani women's perspectives, for LGBTQI+ voices, and for stories that refuse any single, flattened idea of who Roma and Sinti are.
To believe with courage is also to refuse the myths that were dreamed up about us by others. This year, AKE DIKHEA? invites you to watch closely — and to question the superstition at the door.
This year, AKE DIKHEA? turns the lens back on the myth itself. Under the motto "Breaking the Spell", the festival poses the question: who benefits when a people is treated as mysterious rather than human? What happens when Romani filmmakers take a stereotype that was built to exoticise and frighten, and reclaim it, meaning to bend it, mock it, dismantle it, or fill it with real memory instead of projection?
Superstition works by keeping its subject unknowable. It thrives on distance. Film does the opposite: it brings the audience close, into a home, a family, into a lived life, where no myth survives contact with the particular. That is the quiet power our program holds this year: stories that refuse to be symbols, told by the people the symbols were made about.
Our films this year move in both directions. Some confront the old stereotype head-on, taking a myth built to frighten and turning it back on those who invented it. Others go inward, toward the rituals, warnings, and quiet magic that Romani families still live by — not as something to be embarrassed of or explained away, but as a form of knowledge with its own logic, its own care, its own truth.
Breaking the Spell, in this sense, is not the opposite of dreaming. It may be one of its oldest forms.
As always, we remain committed to intersectionality: superstition does not fall on all Romani people equally. Our selection continues to make room for Romani women's perspectives, for LGBTQI+ voices, and for stories that refuse any single, flattened idea of who Roma and Sinti are.
To believe with courage is also to refuse the myths that were dreamed up about us by others. This year, AKE DIKHEA? invites you to watch closely — and to question the superstition at the door.
AKE DIKHEA? at 10: A Retrospective Celebration
20:00 • SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA
Ten years ago, AKE DIKHEA? opened its doors with an imperative to amplify marginalized voices, dismantle stereotypes, and celebrate the rich and multifaceted nature of Romani ethnicity and culture. To mark a decade, we return to where it began — four award-winning films from the festival's history, chosen not as artifacts but as proof of what's held true since year one. To open the festival, we look back as we prepare to go forward and celebrate a decade of Romani films and filmmakers reclaiming the cinematic frame.
Fünfzehn Minuten (Fifteen Minutes)
Sejad Ademaj
Germany • 2022 • 15’
German and Romani with English subtitles
Horo ano Boro (Dance in the Courtyard)
Benjamin Menekshe
Kosovo • 2025 • 30’
Albanian and Romani with English subtitles
Chavo
Alecio Araci
Sweden • 2023 • 15’
Romani with English subtitles
9/8 Fight 41
Gizem Aksu
Turkey • 2022 • 15’
Turkish with English subtitles
Fr. 18.9.
Shorts Program: Futures, Blossoming
This program of shorts moves through the interior lives of Romani youth — their language, their memories and how they're told, the fragments of love and passion embedded in the rhythms of everyday life. Taken together, these four films go beyond the mainstream images of Romani subjects as spectacle or sorrow and offer alternative visions. This is a section about the present tense, and about the future that’s quietly and insistently blossoming.
Denkst du auch, was ich denk, Couseng
Lotta Becker
Germany • 2025 • 16’
German with English subtitles
Gadje
Georges Vanev
Bulgaria • 2025 • 24’
Bulgarian with English subtitles
All The Love in My Body
Carmen Baltzar
Finland, Greece • 2026 • 14’
Greek, Romani, English, Norwegian with English subtitles
Vtedy na Morave (Once Upon A Time In Moravia)
Rastislav Kupšo
Czechia • Slovakia • 2025, 28’
Slovak with English subtitles
Caliu: Nothing Else, What Else Can I Do?
Feeling trapped in the Roma village where he was born, Caliu refuses to accept that his glorious days as the “King of the Violin” are behind him. As he grapples with the challenges of the present and memories of his golden past, he sets out on a journey to reinvent himself. Through it all, music remains the one constant that carries him forward. Set against the vibrant backdrop of fiddler music, the film unfolds between lively concerts and the repetitive, quiet rhythms of the village, following the legendary violinist Caliu and revealing a man driven by unwavering ambition despite the decline of his musical tradition.
Simona Constantin
Romania • 2025 • 90’
Romanian with English subtitles
Roma Frequencies by AKE DIKHEA?
22:00 • HANE Salon
As part of the 10th edition of AKE DIKHEA? – The International Festival of Romani Film, four Roma musicians turn SİNEMA HANE into a shifting soundscape between dance floor, listening session, and shared memory.
Building on the festival’s curatorial frame of ‘Breaking the Spell’, we’ll create an evening where Roma frequencies unsettle inherited images, amplify silenced stories, and trace new connections between Wedding, Marzahn, and transnational Roma diasporas.
The Balkan Onions band, composed of trumpeter Cristinel Manole, clarinetist Yasin Kiran, and synth player Nermin Alishani weave motifs from Balkan and Roma music into electronic textures, samples, and shifting tempos.
Between improvised passages, slow, almost cinematic moments and dance‑oriented sets from DJ Urosh, the night moves through the in‑between spaces of archive and present, club and meyhane, film festival and salon.
Sa. 19.9.
To start the day’s programming, we will gather at SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA for brunch and a morning of knowledge sharing with our AVAZYA Film Professionals Network. An opportunity to meet the directors, producers and actors of this year’s AKE DIKHEA? films, as well as other film and cultural workers for discussion and exchange of ideas and experiences.
Professor Dr. Ömer Alkin will open the brunch with a talk on the topic “What the Gaze Overlooks: Post-Migrant Cinema between Diversity and Exclusion”: The talk will explore what "postmigrant" actually means, and what "postmigrant cinema" could signify. He will also explore how engagement in the film field can also be understood as a trilemma of inclusion – visibility, interpretive authority, and critique – which often come into conflict with one another.
Discussion and communing over brunch will follow!
Avazya Network Festival Brunch
11:00 • SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA
To start the day’s programming, we will gather at SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA for brunch and a morning of knowledge sharing with our AVAZYA Film Professionals Network. An opportunity to meet the directors, producers and actors of this year’s AKE DIKHEA? films, as well as other film and cultural workers for discussion and exchange of ideas and experiences.
Professor Dr. Ömer Alkin will open the brunch with a talk on the topic “What the Gaze Overlooks: Post-Migrant Cinema between Diversity and Exclusion”: The talk will explore what "postmigrant" actually means, and what "postmigrant cinema" could signify. He will also explore how engagement in the film field can also be understood as a trilemma of inclusion – visibility, interpretive authority, and critique – which often come into conflict with one another.
Discussion and communing over brunch will follow!
Shorts Program: Insistent Existence
A selection of shorts tracing how politics shapes the everyday lives of Roma people across generations and countries. The stories are told through borders and forced displacement, LGBTQI+ bodies and their visibility in public spaces, memory and the question of where Romani stories are allowed to be archived. Moving between personal experience and collective history, the films confront the structures that determine who belongs, who is remembered, and who gets to represent stories of various Roma protagonists. Together, they approach cinema as a political space in itself: a place to reclaim Roma histories, contest imposed narratives, and insist on the right to speak from one's own position.
Heimweh
Allegra Schneider, Maria Ulrich, Patrick Schaefers
Germany • 2025 • 8’
German with English subtitles
System Error
Allegra Schneider
Germany • 2026 • 8’
German with English subtitles
The Exhibition
Dáša Raimanová, Béla Váradi
Hungary, UK, Norway • 2026 • 23’
Hungarian English with English subtitles
I Am What I Am
Allegra Schneider, Anne Klopfer, Renata Horváthová, Kathrin Krahl, Maria Ulrich
Germany • 2026 • 35’
German with English subtitles
Who We Were
Charles Newland
UK • 2026 • 11’
English
Breaking The Circle of Early Marriages and Early Motherhood in Roma Communities
This documentary examines early marriage and motherhood in Roma communities across Europe, shaped by marginalisation, poverty, limited education, and entrenched social norms. Made under an EU Erasmus+ project coordinated by KLIMAKA NGO (Greece), it gives voice to young Roma girls and women alongside families, community leaders, and institutions. Moving beyond stereotypes, the film calls for equal access to education, community dialogue, vocational pathways, and stronger policy protections — advocating for every girl's right to choose her own future.
Eva Giannelou, Stavros Andreas Kostakis
Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Romania • 2026 • 60’
Greek with English subtitles
¡Volare Volare! - Esméralda’s Family to the Pilgrimage of Santa Sara in Saintes-Maries-de-la-mer
In May, the Romani people gather in the Camargue to worship Saint Sara Kali. Cecilia and Marco, gagè (non-Roma), follow Esméralda and her family – a group of French Manouche — with a small camera, immersing themselves in the pilgrimage in search of the true spirit of the Gens du Voyage, the traveling people. What they discover is that the search for freedom lies in belonging — a sense of community inherent to all human beings. Real change begins where Roma and gagè come together. “Khetanes!”
Marco Pinnavaia & Cecilia Rizzuto
Italy • 2024 • 67’
French and Italian with English subtitles
¡Volare Volare! - Esméralda’s Family to the Pilgrimage of Santa Sara in Saintes-Maries-de-la-mer
In May, the Romani people gather in the Camargue to worship Saint Sara Kali. Cecilia and Marco, gagè (non-Roma), follow Esméralda and her family – a group of French Manouche — with a small camera, immersing themselves in the pilgrimage in search of the true spirit of the Gens du Voyage, the traveling people. What they discover is that the search for freedom lies in belonging — a sense of community inherent to all human beings. Real change begins where Roma and gagè come together. “Khetanes!”
Marco Pinnavaia & Cecilia Rizzuto
Italy • 2024 • 67’
French and Italian with English subtitles
Italy • 2024 • 67’
French and Italian with English subtitles
AKE DIKHEA? 10. Edition Award Ceremony
AKE DIKHEA? 10. Edition Award Ceremony
20:00 • SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA
Festival Party
22:00 • SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA
Tonight, there are no winners and losers — we have all won. In the spirit of this year’s festival theme, “Breaking the Spell,” we celebrate breaking free from inherited images and making space for new ways of seeing, being seen, and imagining our futures together. Leave the heaviness behind and bring a little spring into your soul. Lose yourself in the fierce rhythm of Romani beats—the stage is officially yours at AKE DIKHEA? Dance to live music sets from DJ RomaVilo and DJ Bariş. Step into the circle and let's own the night together!
Tonight, there are no winners and losers — we have all won. In the spirit of this year’s festival theme, “Breaking the Spell,” we celebrate breaking free from inherited images and making space for new ways of seeing, being seen, and imagining our futures together. Leave the heaviness behind and bring a little spring into your soul. Lose yourself in the fierce rhythm of Romani beats—the stage is officially yours at AKE DIKHEA? Dance to live music sets from DJ RomaVilo and DJ Bariş. Step into the circle and let's own the night together!
Su. 20.9.
Lindy the Return of Little Light
Lindy the Return of Little Light
17:00 • SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA
To close out the 10th Edition of AKE DIKHEA?, we once again look back at the films that shaped the festival over the years.
The winner of the 2020 Best Film Award and Audience Choice Awards at AKE DIKHEA?, Lindy the Return of Little Light follows Lindy Larsson, who grew up a Romani Traveller in a small Swedish paper mill town and scaped bullying and prejudice through a self-created superhero, Little Light. Having long hidden his background to protect his family from Sweden's structural racism, and coming out as gay decades earlier, Larsson is now a celebrated performing artist on the cusp of international recognition. When Berlin's Maxim Gorki Theatre asks him to tell his own story on stage, he must decide whether to finally reveal his Romani Traveller identity publicly.
Ida Persson Lännerberg
Sweden • 2019 • 72’
Swedish with English subtitles
Award Winner Film Screening
Award Winner Film Screening
19:00 • SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA
Tickets
A screening of the Best Film and Best Short Film winners from the 10th Edition of AKE DIKHEA? Films to be announced following the award ceremony on Saturday, September 19th.
Tickets
A screening of the Best Film and Best Short Film winners from the 10th Edition of AKE DIKHEA? Films to be announced following the award ceremony on Saturday, September 19th.