Roma Film-Makers Seize the Camera: Seville's 'Raising Romani Gaze' Is the First Programme of Its Kind

Seven films by Roma directors screen together for the first time at a major European festival. The work is uneven in form but unified in purpose: narrative sovereignty after a century of being cast as props.

For roughly as long as cinema has existed, Roma people have appeared on screen as objects — villains, exotics, local colour for someone else's story. The Raising Romani Gaze programme at the 23rd Seville European Film Festival, running 10-14 November 2026, is the first curated showcase at a major European festival where Roma film-makers hold the camera and the editorial authority. Seven films, multiple countries, one argument: we tell our own stories now. The programme's anchor is Alina Șerban's I Matter, which won the audience award at Venice's spotlight section earlier this year. Șerban, a Romanian-born actor and director, built the film around a young woman reckoning with Romany identity during her coming of age. It is not a polemic or a documentary — it is a character study that happens to centre a life European cinema has historically refused to see as complex. 'I wanted to show, in a very simple but complex manner, that we are human too,' Șerban said. The range across the seven films matters as much as any single title. Katalin Bársony's documentary follows a young man born in Germany to Roma parents who is deported to Kosovo. Jero de los Santos's Spanish film explores queer and Romany intersections. Charles Newland's Smooth the Edges — the first BFI-funded film with a Romany director, producer, and lead cast — captures a British Romany woman deciding whether to hide her background to dodge workplace discrimination. The dilemma Newland dramatises is structurally interesting: you can escape prejudice by erasing yourself, but the cost is self-repression. That tension between passing and belonging is the programme's recurring engine. Newland's observation about the racial politics his community faces in Britain is sharp and worth sitting with: 'There are a lot of people who can be racist against my group of people, but then on the same token, when it suits their argument, refer to you as white as well.' The double bind — racialised when convenient, de-racialised when that serves a different agenda — is a structural feature of anti-Roma prejudice that these films collectively make visible. The programme was a decade in the making, organised in part through Bársony's Romédia Foundation, an NGO using storytelling and visual archives to strengthen Roma self-representation. With an estimated 10-12 million Roma across Europe — the continent's largest minority — the gap between demographic weight and cultural visibility has been enormous. Bársony frames it plainly: 'From the start of the silent film, Romany people have been put in certain roles. And those roles were mostly passive and defined by the outside gaze.' What makes this programme worth watching is not that every film will be individually extraordinary — debut and early-career work rarely is — but that the collective act of programming creates a new category. Șerban describes every decision on her film as 'an act of resistance' and says she became 'an ambassador without choosing to be one.' That burden is real, and it is also the condition that makes first-wave movements matter more structurally than aesthetically. The question is whether this showcase opens a pipeline or remains a one-off gesture. The honest assessment: this is a cultural-infrastructure story as much as a film story. The individual works range from Venice-validated (I Matter) to BFI-first milestones (Smooth the Edges) to festival documentaries. The collective significance outweighs any single title. If you care about who gets to make European cinema and what stories European festivals validate, this is a marker event.