Roma Film-Makers Claim the Screen at Seville's 'Raising Romani Gaze'

Seven films by Romany directors screen this week at the 23rd Seville European Film Festival, in a showcase curators describe as the first of its kind in Europe. The programme, titled Raising Romani Gaze, runs from 10 to 14 November 2026 and gathers film-makers from across the continent.

At its centre is Alina Șerban, the Romanian Romany actor and film-maker whose short film I Matter won the audience award in the Venice Film Festival's spotlight section earlier this year. The film follows a young woman reckoning with her Romany identity as she comes of age.

"It's work made by us, not just about us," Șerban said. "I was raised in a world where everything I heard about my community came from the exterior … The perspective is finally being centred."

Growing up in Romania, she said, Roma people on screen appeared as villains or exotic figures. That pattern is what the programme sets out to break.

Who built the programme?

Katalin Bársony, a Romany film-maker from Hungary and one of the curators, said the showcase caps a decade of groundwork. She also leads the Romédia Foundation, an NGO that uses storytelling, film and visual archives to strengthen Roma self-representation.

"Romany people, despite being the biggest minority in Europe, we are one of the most underserved and invisible when it comes to our own art that we create," Bársony said.

The programme, she said, offers "narrative sovereignty" to some of the estimated 10–12 million Roma living across Europe. "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."

The selection includes:

• A documentary by Bársony following a young man born in Germany to Roma parents who is deported to Kosovo
• A film by Spanish director Jero de los Santos exploring queer and Romany perspectives
• Smooth the Edges, by Nottingham-based Romany film-maker Charles Newland

What does the British film add?

Newland called his short "a bit of an outlier" — the first film funded by the British Film Institute by a Romany director with a Romany producer and a lead Romany cast.

The film dramatises a dilemma he described as common in Britain's Romany community: a young woman deciding whether to hide her background to avoid workplace discrimination. The trade-off, he said, is escaping prejudice at the cost of repressing part of herself.

He also pointed to the political limbo Roma in the UK face. "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," Newland said. "So you get stuck between this rock and a hard place."

What changes for Roma on screen?

Șerban framed the stakes bluntly. "As they say, the last form of acceptable racism is towards Roma people," she said. "Being Roma for me, at least in the Romanian context, and for my generation, meant that you were somehow inferior."

Every decision on I Matter, she said, felt like an "act of resistance". "Hopefully, in some years' time, there will be 50 or 100 films like mine. But since I was one of the first to bring this perspective, I had all this pressure and all these nuances to think about. You become an ambassador without choosing to be one."

The prize, she argued, is two-sided: audiences see Roma living complex human lives, and Roma viewers see themselves as more than stereotypes. "Films bring change," she said. "Art makes people think of how life is for another person."