ROOM IN THE SQUARE
Hungary, 2011, 8 min
K.A. Eglinton, N. Benarrosh-Orsoni
28.01.2012 14:35
The square formerly known as Moszkva tér (Moscow Square) in Budapest is the setting for this short film. Through the documentation of people’s voices and activities, this film underlines how the city’s busiest transport hub is also a space that Budapest’s most profoundly marginalised groups rely on for their livelihood and survival.
Kristen Ali Eglinton lives in London and is an applied visual ethnographer and qualitative researcher. She trained as a multi-media artist in the United States before getting a PhD in social and educational research. She has worked with diverse communities across the globe using innovative, digital and multi-media methods.
Norah Benarrosh-Orsoni, born in 1985, is a French PhD Student of Ethnology. She studies the migration process among Roma families living between France and Romania.
Directors: Kristen Ali Eglinton, Norah Benarrosh-Orsoni
The action in the film revolves around an ancestrally used practice of hunting sable by net. Set in rural Kamchatka in the Russian Far East, where fewer than 20 speakers of Itelmen remain, the film goes beyond its original aim to recapture a language and a hunting practice that are remembered but no longer in use. Two hunters encounter the wild environs and villages of Kamchatka as a history laden homeland and memories, nostalgia, resignation and hope echo throughout the film.
What should antropological films be like? How to come to terms with alternating view of the world and with stereotypes in us? In a 3-year span, this issue kept busy an execution team around Milan Durňak who went back to his home-village to capture life of Roma people together with their Ruthenian neighbours. Every stay in the Roma colony brought one episode of a film which captures everyday life, tries to describe problems which trouble them and constantly strive to jump over their own shadows. The spectator has a chance to encounter a story in a social-cummunity centre with a hard-working mayor and festivals in the village and think about the worries and merriments of one Roma colony.
