“We should end the 600 years of discrimination against the Roma people”

The filmmaker presents a short film in which she delves into the struggle of gypsy feminist women in Cartagena to be heard in a society that turns its back on them.

There is a scene near the end of Carmen, without fear of freedom, the short documentary made by the Catalan director Irene Baquéin which three of its protagonists, women of the Feminist Gypsy Associationthey dream of a future in which their struggle is no longer so lonely, in which those who are now girls take to the streets on May 16, the Day of the Roma Resistance, and remember the current struggle in favor of feminism Gypsy.

It is an almost idyllic moment. They are sitting on the rocks, next to the coast of Cartagena, watching a sunset that from then on overflows with hope. Something that activists do not have enough of since, today, gypsy feminism still has a long way to gomany frustrations to go through and, above all, many consciences to awaken.

The documentary takes us to the reality of the neighborhood of the 600 in Cartagena, Murcia, where a group of feminist gypsy women fight daily against an anti-gypsyism that refuses to disappear. Throughout it we see them talk to each other about their struggle, about the difficulties of finding work, demand changes in social policies in front of a city councilor, and reflect on the preponderance of white women in the feminist demands of nowadays.

“In 2018 I read an article in the magazine Pikara that talked about the Association of Feminist Gypsies and it immediately caught my attention,” explains Baqué, “partly because He had been traveling around the world for some time in search of stories of resistance starring women and women’s groups, and this was not in a distant country, but very close to home”.

Baqué He was born in Barcelona, ​​but has lived in London for 11 years. During six of them she was making short documentaries on women’s rights for the newspaper Guardian in various countries around the world such as Bangladesh, El Salvador, Philippines, India, Mozambique, Kenya, Gambia or Mexico, among others. “By learning the story of these women, I realized that I didn’t have to go that far to tell inspiring stories.”

That’s when he contacted Maria Jose Jimenez Guru, the president of the organization, who also has a leading role in the piece. “When Irene contacted me and proposed the project, I immediately thought of Carmen Fernández, an activist from our organization, who lives in a place as far from the world as Cartagena,” jokes Guru. “There we have a lot of activity with very strong women, leaders of her community, and I thought that Carmen was the type of person that Irene needed to collect through her character all that resilience typical of gypsy women & rdquor; .

“In addition to crystallizing the entire struggle of gypsy women, Carmen “It also represents a moment of change that is happening in Spain,” says Baqué. “She was the first person in his family to go to university and she is a prominent character of a first generation of women who are becoming references. They have not had role models, but they are going to become one for their daughters, for their nieces. Carmen is the protagonist of the story but, as we always say, It is not the story of Carmen alone, it is the story of many”.

After finding the characters, a process began that lasted almost three years in which there were no cameras: it was about creating a strong bond based on mutual trust. “It was a period of learning for all of us about representation, about discrimination and about how to make the cinema that interests us,” says Baqué.

“Before we started working together, even meeting in person, we talked for many hours,” Guru recalls. “In those talks Irene tried to explain to us what her vision of her project was and what she intended to do. It was a very important period because we were very burned from the last appearances of the women gypsies in the media. Very representations stereotypedvery prejudicedlike for example the one in the movie Carmen and Lolawhich had won a lot of awards and was the most anti-gypsy thing in the world.

Irene recognizes that The activists have been very involved in the final product. “We did the filming with a very small team but very committed to the subject,” she explains. “We had Artur-Pol Camprubí as director of photography, Diego Pedragosa as sound and Carlota Coloma as producer. We wanted to make an observational documentary but also use the language of cinema, so we proposed topics to talk about in certain situations, but then we shot for an hour or two, letting the protagonists speak in their own way and reach conclusions on their own. There was a lot of assembly work behind it but we always worked in collaboration with them, to ensure that we were creating a piece that they were proud of, that honestly represented their reality. So they were also at the end of the montage.”

Without a doubt, one of the key scenes of the film is the moment in which the three protagonist women, Carmen, Guru and María, plus another Latin American feminist activist, go to speak with a councilor of the Cartagena City Council. There, without needing to emphasize anything, we see how these women crash against a wall that listens to their proposals, even applauds them, but does absolutely nothing, which plunges the protagonists into total discouragement. “We are empowered”we heard Guru say after the meeting, “but we don’t have the power”.

A critique of white feminism

From scenes like this, it can also be said that Carmen, without fear of freedom It is a criticism of whiter feminism that does not take into account racialized women, a criticism that is at the foundations of the Association of Feminist Gypsies. “The basis of our speech is that There is a gypsy feminism, even though they deny it, even though they accuse our people of being sexist.”, explains Guru. “But when the feminist agendas were launched, already in the first wave, the issue of racism was never taken into account. Neither in Spain nor in Europe. And I have always said it, since I can remember: If a feminist agenda is not anti-racist, it will never be feminist. Then I found out that Angela Davis said it too. And what the feminist agendas of the white clowns do is a feminism of privilege, a feminism for them”.

“It is a reality that happens in this country,” agrees Baqué. “The first marches of the 8M after the movement of the MeToo They were led by privileged white women who discriminated against women from other groups. So gypsy groups, Afro-descendants or trans women, marched together”. There is a scene in the film in which this joint struggle is perfectly represented. In it, the protagonists are all sitting on the floor of their apartment in Cartagena, surrounded by fellow indigenous Latinas and Muslims, and they talk about what racialized feminist struggles have in common.

Another of the key themes of the piece is policy ineffectiveness to improve the situation of these women or the Roma people in general. It is not that there are no policies to improve the situation, but that these are either poorly applied or have no effect. Given this, the protagonists demand more participation. “What they propose is a own representation and that all aid that comes from the European Union for the Roma population goes directly to Roma women“, without intermediaries like there are now,” explains Baqué. “We should end the 600 years of discrimination against the Roma people. Quotas would have to be applied so that Roma people could access certain jobs. For example, in institutes and colleges that have a high number of Roma students, there should be Roma teachers and there are none. It is important that children grow up with role models.

“What the councilor tells us in the short is what absolutely all the councilors from all sides tell us,” explains Guru, “the mayors, the general directors of the ministries. They tell us: ‘Very good, very good, you continue fighting, we are here to order society’ and then they order society by creating neighborhoods like the 600 from Cartagena or the 3000 of Sevilla. The gypsy cause continues to be in the mixed bag of social services and delegated to large foundations of payos and payas. This is crazy. It is like thinking that the public health system of the payos was in the hands of Cáritas. That is our reality, our entire cause. All of our health, culture, history, politics, everything depends on a social worker who acts at her discretion. What we ask is that in each city council, in each autonomous community and at the state level, there is a line of work against racism and antigypsyism, where measures are designed, where medium and long-term objectives are projected and where these projects are evaluated and are developed by racialized women, not by the clown who holds the chair for years and years and doesn’t know what the thing is about. That’s never going to work. If you do not have an intercultural team of prepared people who are capable of launching projects that directly affect the empowerment of the community and the particular empowerment of Roma women, then they will answer us as the councilor in the short film has answered us, of course” .

Road to the Goyas and the Gaudís

Carmen, without fear of freedom, has been screening at national and international film festivals for a year now. From Medina del Campo, to Curtas Vila du Conde, passing through l’Alternativa, the Cerdanya Film Fest, Som Cinema a Lleida and many others. “This has allowed us to be candidates for the Goya and Gaudí awards this year 2024”, explains Irene. At the beginning of next year, the short will be available in our country on a platform that the director cannot yet reveal.