10 YEARS AKE DIKHEA?
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.

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