The documentary is subtitled and has no voice over.
To point out the multilingualism of Roma the subtitles are differently coloured. Each colour of the subtitle represents another language. Depending on the spoken language, the subtitles are dyed accordingly: white for Serbian, green for German, orange for Romanes (language of the Gypsies), yellow for Turkish, blue for Italian, and purple for Albanian.
The film is raised by the film foundation North Rhine-Westphalia. The film is dedicated to all Gypsies in Eastern Europe.
The documentary is told with the close perspective of the persons affected; neither do experts speak nor are statistics quoted. The frame story addresses the situation of the Gypsies in Germany based on the fate of Iva and her family who seek for asylum. The central part of the film turns to the personal living conditions of the Gypsies in Belgrade.
The film consists of an introduction, a central and a conclusion part. Before the actual film there is a prelude. Experts comment in the postlude (after play) only. The Gypsies as a minority have been socially excluded for centuries. This still ongoing status leads to the development of specific own survival strategy and obstructs an opening towards the society of the non-Gypsies. This determines the dramatic composition, the protagonists accompany the film only for a small part, and then the film faces to new protagonists and new locations.
The film gets along without background music. The only exception is the background music of the sequence with a young prostitute. The background music becomes a critical message by breaking the pure documentary of the film and by referring to the European history of reception of the opera as well as the iconography of Carmen which is related to the opera. Such like Shakespeare’s Shylock became an object of anti-Semitic projection during the centuries, the world’s most played opera provides a lot of opportunities for imagination of antiziganism and formes notion on Gypsies since its creation.
The film opens the prelude with a picture of symbolic content, in which water, darkness and light are the formative elements of the picture. Images with nearly the same objects are used in the end of the film. This back reference to the prelude, this ring structure, is an important element of the composition of this film.
Consisting of about 15 million people, gypsies are the largest European minority which is domiciled in all European countries. They left India one thousand years ago and immigrated in small groups and different ways to Europe. The gypsies were mentioned in a document for the first time 1348 on the Balkan and 1407 in Germany. They have no own national territory where they can retire into. Regarding their situation, you can compare them with Jews, both concerning social exclusion as well as concerning the persecution in all European countries throughout the centuries.