Roma in Nonfiction Film in the NFA Collection (1918-1993)

The project is influenced by contemporary debates about the legacy of colonialism in the theory and institutional practice of memory institutions and the need for their revision and transformation. It is now clear why the decolonisation of museums and archives is also relevant to countries that do not themselves have a colonial experience and where issues of restitution are not as relevant as in Western Europe. Comparative studies of the depiction of non-European cultures in Western art and the depiction of the Roma (not only) in Central European space have demonstrated that the Roma have become the Central European equivalent of the colonial imagination of African and Asian "primitive" peoples. The focus on the Roma ethnicity is thus based on these historical connotations of visual and textual discourses that implicitly define the hegemonic entity (empire, nation, West) vis-a-vis the foreign element. The focus on non-fiction film stems from the fact that by its very nature it contains materials concerning linguistic and ethnic diversity, and allows for the study of their changing representation and interpretation in Czechoslovak cinema, and the ways in which the view of this ethnic group within society has been shaped through it.