Aleksandar Petrovic 1961-1970 Arthouse Drama Yugoslavia

Aleksandar Petrovic – Skupljaci perja AKA I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967)

adminDecember 2, 2021

0 1,633

Plain of Vojvodina, Serbia, where many Gypsies live. Married to a woman much older than him with whom he has already had many children, Bora is often absent. His job as a feather worker takes him from village to village. On the road, he falls in love with Tissa, a young, vagabond and wild Gypsy on the run. Her brutal and possessive father-in-law Mirta makes a wedding proposal to a young Gypsy, hoping to keep her close to him. But Tissa rejects her young husband and, unbeknownst to everyone, leaves with Bora in the mountains to get married by a monk. But very quickly, Tissa gets bored and runs away again, decided to join Belgrade…

Quote:
Aleksandar Petrovic’s I Even Met Happy Gypsies has the distinction of being one of the earliest internationally released features to be made in the Romani language. Because of the tendency of nomadic people to pass down culture orally, it’s a language that has long struggled to be recognised and written into the annals of linguistic history.

Soundtracked by genuine Gypsy melodies and unafraid of depicting the shocking poverty of isolated traveller sites around what was then Yugoslavia, Petrovic’s story is one of small-time dramas and family machinations, filmed with a heightened black and white realism that gives it a stylised documentary feel. The subject matter, too, is ultimately fitting – ritualised courtship, elopements, domestic strife and a girl seeking to escape the cruelty of a domineering stepfather – all feel deeply relevant to the close-knit, family-oriented Traveller community.