Hard-Hitting Student Film On European Gypsies' Grim Lives
31 May 2012
Film-maker, Artur Conka, editing his film at Markeaton Street editing suite.
Lunik IX is one of the biggest Roma ghettoes in Europe. Very little has been done to give the people who live there a voice so I wanted to go back and document their daily lives
”Artur Conka
Stills from the Lunik IX film.
The crippling poverty of Roma gypsies in a mass housing complex in Slovakia has been filmed by a University of Derby student - who lived there as a child.
Artur Conka, 21, returned to the vast, crumbling Lunik IX housing complex in Kosice, Slovakia, to photograph and make a short film about its residents and the conditions they live in. He lived there until the age of three when his parents left Slovakia during the collapse of communism, eventually settling in London when he was eight-years-old.
The final year BA (Hons) Photography degree student returned to Lunik IX to film how its inhabitants, who are mostly Roma and gypsy peoples located there by the government, live in crumbling tower blocks surrounded by rubbish, with very limited running water and power supplies. Artur still has family living there.
His film and photographs will be on free public display at the University's Markeaton Street site in Derby from Saturday 2 June until 12 June, as part of the annual Degree Shows of final year students' work.
This year's shows period - entitled 'Odyssey' - will feature works by students in visual communications, film, photography, textiles, fashion, product design, architecture, fine art and many other subjects; all in free public exhibitions at the Markeaton Street and Britannia Mill sites, in Derby.
Artur said: "Lunik IX is one of the biggest Roma ghettoes in Europe. Very little has been done to give the people who live there a voice so I wanted to go back and document their daily lives.
"They live in terrible poverty, surviving how they can. In Slovakia it's still frowned upon to be of the Roma race, like me, and a lot of segregation goes on. I was actually interviewed by a Slovakian TV station while I was out there, simply because it's so unusual for a Roma to get the kind of education and opportunities I've been lucky enough to have at Derby and elsewhere."
On the film we see Lunik IX residents foraging for wood to burn for warmth and doing cash in hand jobs to earn money. Artur had to translate his interviewees' Romani language into English captions for the film.
He added: "I met members of my family still living there, including my cousin who appears on film. It was very difficult seeing them living in those conditions, when all you're able to do to help them is to give them some money."
After the University's Degree Shows Artur hopes to further develop the film and show it at international short film festivals, and publicise the plight of the Roma communities shown on it, who he says receive very little political support in their own country.
For more information about the University's Degree Shows 2012 and to see a full programme go to website: www.derby.ac.uk/degreeshow
For more media information please contact Press & PR Officer Sean Kirby on 01332 591891 or 07876 476103, or email s.kirby@derby.ac.uk
