The 10th edition of AKE DIKHEA? – International Festival of Romani Film – takes place at SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA in Berlin, a space shaped by migrant, diasporic, and counter-hegemonic cinematic practices. In this setting, the festival unfolds as a moment of attention to the conditions under which images emerge, circulate, and persist.
Its proximity to Berlin-Marzahn marks a historical resonance: in 1936, a forced camp was established there to remove Roma and Sinti from the cityscape in preparation for the Olympic Games. This gesture of erasure continues to reverberate — not only spatially, but through enduring regimes of visibility and misrepresentation.
“Breaking the Spell” follows these reverberations without fixing them in place. It attends to the persistence of images and narratives that have long shaped perceptions of Roma lives. What has been framed as superstition begins to shift: less a belief than a projection, less an attribute than a structure that orders visibility and exclusion.
Rather than confronting these inheritances directly, the festival moves along their edges. It traces fractures, echoes, and quiet refusals. Time unfolds as layered and recursive, opening space for interruption and rearticulation. Within this movement, the “Romacene*,” informed by Roma Futurism, emerges as a way of inhabiting time otherwise — not as correction, but as reorientation.
— Hamze Bytyçi, Artistic Director
*Written by Mihaela Drăgan and performed by the Giuvlipen company, Romacen - The Age of the Witch tells the story of six cyber-witches who created an isolated, futuristic society called Romacen.
Its proximity to Berlin-Marzahn marks a historical resonance: in 1936, a forced camp was established there to remove Roma and Sinti from the cityscape in preparation for the Olympic Games. This gesture of erasure continues to reverberate — not only spatially, but through enduring regimes of visibility and misrepresentation.
“Breaking the Spell” follows these reverberations without fixing them in place. It attends to the persistence of images and narratives that have long shaped perceptions of Roma lives. What has been framed as superstition begins to shift: less a belief than a projection, less an attribute than a structure that orders visibility and exclusion.
Rather than confronting these inheritances directly, the festival moves along their edges. It traces fractures, echoes, and quiet refusals. Time unfolds as layered and recursive, opening space for interruption and rearticulation. Within this movement, the “Romacene*,” informed by Roma Futurism, emerges as a way of inhabiting time otherwise — not as correction, but as reorientation.
— Hamze Bytyçi, Artistic Director
*Written by Mihaela Drăgan and performed by the Giuvlipen company, Romacen - The Age of the Witch tells the story of six cyber-witches who created an isolated, futuristic society called Romacen.