I saw Aferim! at the Berlinale last year and the film has stayed
with me ever since. Finally, it is
getting the wider release that it deserves.
This remarkable film, directed by the Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, is
set in nineteenth-century Wallachia, a region in what is now Romania but was then part
of the Ottoman Empire. The narrative is framed around a policeman and his son
who are sent to find a runaway Roma slave and return him to his owner, a boyar (a kind of feudal lord). The widescreen black and white photography
lends the landscapes a vivid verisimilitude and belies the desperate poverty
and violence that lurk everywhere. I can
think of no other film that so brilliantly and devastatingly depicts the
historical plight of the Roma (and illuminates the contemporary weight of the
past). Aferim! is surely a milestone in European cinema.
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