New Releases
Documentaries
March 2003
Sign up here to receive our free, monthly Featured Titles newsletter
Click here to remove yourself from our mailing list if you're already a subscriber.
Editor's Note:
Please see below for more LAVA news
Gypsies Without Tents Get Details and Purchasing Info
Ivan Tziboulka
Documentary 62 minutes 2002
With English subtitles
GYPSIES WITHOUT TENTS portrays the lives of Chile’s estimated 15 – 20,000 Romanies (Gypsies) by documenting the stories of three families and their everyday struggles to reconcile their traditional culture with the advantages offered by cultural assimilation. The film brings us into the families’ homes, their places of worship, the children’s schools, and the markets where the men trade, where the protagonists speak, in the Romani language as well as Spanish, about their lives and their concerns as Chileans and as Romanies. We are shown through the experiences of the subjects themselves the shifting terrain that is Romani identity in the Americas.The documentary’s treatment of the children’s school captures many of the issues implicit in Romani life: discrimination, gender roles, and frequent travel. Young Deborah wants to be a professional, and her brother wants to be a priest, but they are teased at school for being Gypsies and have few friends. After the family moves away for a few months, the children are too far behind in their classes to want to continue. Another girl says that she is in school only to learn to read, but that she will probably live a typical Romani woman’s life: marriage, children, domestic chores, and petty vending and fortune-telling to make ends meet. The Romani attitude towards mainstream education in this film is markedly ambivalent – while on the one hand it provides opportunities, the Romani are unwilling to lose their children to mainstream culture.But the same institutions and cultural forms that would seem to dissolve Romani cohesion are often fertile ground for the reinvention and reinterpretation of Romani tradition. The evangelical church, for example, provides an important space for the maintenance of Romani culture through the performance of religious songs in Romani language and musical style. In another scene, as soon as one speaker tells us that the art of the improvisatory singing style is dying out, we see his teenage son and a friend improvising an impromptu rap in the living room. All of this speaks to an assertion that one of the participants in the film makes: “What Gypsies do is adapt. Even if we use cell phones, drive trucks, and live in a house, even if our kids play Nintendo, we don’t stop being Gypsies.” Even so, those interviewed in the film do not see themselves as inherently different as human beings. One man tells the director, “This documentary is important, to show what Gypsies are really like, not the whole show of lights and celebration, but that we have the same problems as any Chilean, that we are humans like any other, that our kids are like your kids.” GYPSIES WITHOUT TENTS eloquently highlights how Romani survival lies in this interplay between adaptation to Chilean life and cultural preservation of Romani roots.
Purchase Price: $ 200.00
Island of Lost Children, The Get Details and Purchasing Info
Florence Jaugey
Documentary 82 minutes 2001
With English subtitles
In February 2001, director Florence Jaugey and cameraman Frank Pineda entered Nicaragua's largest detention center, the Tipitapa prison, to teach a video workshop to inmates. During the three-month workshop, the ten young men selected to participate each created a short film on a topic of their choosing. As they put into practice the skills they learn in the class, we see through their eyes the reality of being condemned to a life sentence at such a young age and the struggles the inmates face as they try to make sense of their lives in prison. The young men discuss what they did to end up there, the conditions inside the prison, and relationships among the inmates. A moving, beautifully-filmed documentary that provides a window on a rarely-seen aspect of life in Managua. Awarded Special Jury Prize at the Paris Documentary Film Festival 2002 and featured at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) Documentary Fortnight 2002.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Other Featured Titles