Website kulturissimo.cz reports that this fall the Světozor cinema in Prague will be welcoming the first-ever year of the Čačikano film festival (www.cacikano.cz), which focuses on Romani themes. The festival will take place on 26 and 27 September 2014.
The lineup includes premieres of some films in the Czech Republic as well as time-tested classics showing Romani people in a different light than usual. "We want to show the richness of Romani culture and we mainly want to extract that culture from the way it is stereotypically perceived by society," explains festival director Alžběta Jílková.
"The slogan for this first year is ‘…because black-and-white is so retro‘," Jílková says. "We are playing with this idea of pigeonholing of people as either black or white, which we’ve already been through long ago. We would like to suggest to these filmgoers that Romani people have their own desires, dreams and interests to pursue and that there is no need to put these filters of colors between us, to differentiate us."
The aim of the organizers was to choose films that do not superficially prioritize the problems Romani people have with racial intolerance and social integration. Of course, it took an all but superhuman effort to find such films.
"We want to show filmgoers Romani people in everday situations. The theme of the Romani issue is, however, always in the background somehow. Our choice of films is not a clean cut away from those problematic questions, but it emphasizes that Romani people definitely are not stuck in the black-and-white hole," comments program director Ondřej Moravec.
Čačikano will show three films in each of its four sections. The "Other Coffee" (Jiná kava) section features films depicting Romani people and their everyday concerns and pleasures.
In Serbian director Boris Mitič’s "Krásná Dyana" ("Pretty Dyana") (2003), Romani people transform old cars into their own original motor vehicles. The film "District!" (2004) introduces us to a Hungarian version of "South Park".
