Directed by Andrei Schwartz, the shooting of our documentary “Europapassage” has started in Hamburg. The film investigates the life of a group of Roma who have been oscillating between Hamburg and their Romanian village for years. Since the Hamburg social authorities decided to take drastic measures to counter the growing number of Roma and began to block access to the emergency winter programme for beggars from Romania, death from frostbite has been a constant threat. With the argument that they were not homeless at all, they were transported on buses to bring them back to Romania. Not everyone left. And most of them came back.
Andrei Schwartz will invite us to meet this group of Roma at eye level, to accompany them in their world on the fringes of both societies – in Romania and in Hamburg – and to get so close to them that we can discover ourselves in them.
The production was supported by the BKM and the Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein. Andrei Schwartz also received support for his research work from the Robert Bosch Foundation and the Literary Colloquium Berlin as part of the “Grenzgänger” program.
