Jasmina, Toplica and Claudia live in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Belgrade. Like other Roma families in the neighbouring shacks, they live in extreme poverty as a result of discrimination and exclusion. Through experience of migration and deportation to and from Germany, Jasmina lives separated from her parents and brothers.This film looks into the struggles of making a living on the margins of society. It also explores how the protagonists remember life in Western Europe and hope to go back there in the near future. Jasmina’s and Tony’s everyday life is permeated by thoughts of escaping, migrating and providing Jasmina’s daughter with a better prospect of life.
Director, camera, script, edit: Marlene Wynants
Production: Marlene Wynants and Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, Manchester
Language of dialogues: German, Serbian, Romani
Language of subtitles: English, Czech
Marlene Wynants studied a BA in Social and Cultral Anthropology in Hamburg and an MA in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. This film is final project of the MA at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology.
Vojvodovo is a village in Bulgaria, inhabited in 1900 – 1950 by several hundred Czech Protestants. During their post-war re-emigration to the border areas of the South Moravia region of Czechoslovakia, they brought along with them the “spirit” of their world. The film tries to bring this world back through video-elicitation. Visual pictures of the Vojvodovo scene fade to the people who gradually fill the recording with the meaning of their experiences, just as a figurine symbolizing the community is being dressed in the film. Among the guardians of the legacy today, besides Vojvodovo and their offspring and descendants, are the professional ethnographers who have succumbed to the magic of Vojvodovo and who have taken part in the reconstruction of its picture with their texts. A similar role is played by the film itself, a multivocal visual narrative constructed both “here” and “there” (in South Moravia and in Bulgaria), another Vojvodovo. The aspect of geographic distance is suppressed, and in the foreground stands a mutuality distributed by professional ethnographers, the Internet, and meetings with (ex)Vojvodovians. All of which poses the question – where is Vojvodovo today?
Author of the movie Tommi Mendel will talk about: research context, main research questions, theoretical background, methodology and results. 
