Ich traf sogar glückliche Zigeuner

During the past few years I've been making an effort to see a number of lesser-known Academy Award nominees from throughout the decades, especially foreign movies. One that I'd read about wasn't sure if I'd ever be able to find is Aleksandar Petrovic's "Skupljaci perja" ("I Even Met Happy Gypsies" in English; the Serbo-Croat title means "The Feather-Gatherers"). Well, I managed to find a copy in a local video store.*

The movie focuses on a Roma man and his relationship with two women in a village in rural Yugoslavia (I assume that it's present-day Serbia). Part of what's interesting about the movie is that it shows us a culture that we rarely get to see (by contrast, do we really need another movie where Tom Cruise narrowly avoids all danger?). The movie looks kind of amateurish, but a movie doesn't have to be fancy to tell a good story. I recommend it if you can find a copy.

Sorry about writing the title and director's name incorrectly. For some reason, IMDb no longer allows diacritics on consonants.

*This just goes to show why we still need video stores. Trust me, this isn't the sort of movie that the streaming services are going to offer.

A tale that seems all too familiar to all the people of the Balkans and Southern Europe. Filled with passion, song, laughter, tears, tragedy and violence. "I Even Met Happy Gypsies" is one of the most notable movies of the Yugoslav Black Wave, which was characterized by black humor, a non-traditional approach to film making and a critical examination of the Yugoslav society and lifestyle. It was a critical darling as it was nominated by the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and it won the Special Grand Prize of the Jury at the Cannes Film Festival, while also being very popular with audiences. Even though it can appear a little sloppy and amateur like at times it is easy to identify with the main characters and engage in the story. It is rightfully considered one the best movies ever from the Balkans, and it paved the way, as well as inspired numerous directors from this region.

When I was a boy, my parents were telling me that in order to stay safe, I need to avoid Roma people. As they were explaining to me, they would kidnap me and sell me into slavery.

At the basketball court and playground in front of our building, the very building I am still living in, there were several Roma boys and girls. They were a lot older than me and we all played together. Yes, there were some incidents and fights amongst all of us, but I can't recall I've ever had problems being safe. There were some violent boys but I always attributed that to problematic upbringing and their social status: they were raised in poor and dysfunctional families.

This film offers fantastic, colorful, stunning, absolutely vivid representation of cultural values and aesthetics of Roma people along with tragedy of their existence. What Petrovic succeeded is to create almost unbearable heaviness of being (yes, the complete opposite of Kaufman's almost similar titled masterpiece). And just when you think of, or rather try to find any hope for protagonists, there is another darkness and tragedy waiting behind the corner. It seems that life of a majority of Roma people, everywhere in the world, is constant struggle against social stigma, prejudice, poverty (which is the output of social exclusion). Than again, those are the very problems other nations/people are facing, too. Which is strange as we are enjoying much higher levels of education, freedom, technology and such. It is obvious that 'Great promise' which followed Industrial Revolution didn't brought what we expected; great happiness for most of the people, unlimited personal freedom, technological advance available to everyone.

Yet, with all those centuries-old problems, Roma people seems much more alive than most of 'us', Western people/nations. Being 'trapped' in poverty and inhumane living conditions, they are living without limits, experiencing strong basic emotions on an everyday basis, constantly trying to overcome their harsh reality.

I saw this film when I was in college in the 1970s. It has vanished completely since then. I think it inspired me to become an "underground filmmaker." I like the style, the scenery, the story, the humor, the depiction of life behind the Iron Curtain--particularly for the Gypsies. I still remember the scene where the one character is throwing feathers off the back of a truck, and the fight scene underneath the feathers. And the "wedding" scene where the "monk" says "Any fish in that river, Tisa?" And where the heroine runs away to the big city and attempts to live by singing on the street. (Is this where she is hitchhiking and gets seduced by a puppet-wielding truck-driver?) Also the use of non-actors--local people--in the film. I don't know if the world presented in this movie is realistic or romanticised, but it was a very good film and it deserves to be seen again today.

This will carry familiar echoes for everyone living from the Danube to the Aegean and perhaps as far east as Istanbul and Armenia; it is roughly the same soul in these places, even though the trivial corners of appearance change. It depicts a rowdy, messy life, full of gambling, cheating, childishness, violence, headstrong passions, song and selfishness, the same mentality that explains all the wars in the area, the ancient animosities, as well as why my country is in shambles these days: too long not masters of our world, we still think it is somebody else's business.

But it's not just human idiocy it depicts, it's not a smarmy film. It's something dumb (as in impossible to articulate) in the blood itself, something that is outwards sloppy, as are the people and places, as is the film, but that's because it's still halfway in trying to fathom itself, the need to cry out in song but no words will come. A softer gloom than we find above the Danube, less mannered (less 'European') than the Czechs, less introspective than further north.

Our gypsy protagonist, a drunkard who is always trying to pawn his mother's TV set and hopping between petty jobs, is brought before a judge and asked why he threw feathers from the back of the car; he doesn't know himself, he'll pay the fine. A train whistles by out the window. It all turns around bartering, deceit and desire to escape, all of them evident in the girl's seduction by the trucker with the handpuppet.

It's aimless, sloppy but lovable, the same cinematic air the people it depicts breath out. It is not Parajanov, but it'll do.

One sees how Kusturica must have seen this, and combined it with Tarkovsky's camera to make Time of the Gypsies.