The Deathless Woman

Roz Mortimer’s film is a haunting hybrid—a blend of documentary, recreation, and fictional mysticism designed to convey the horror of what is often termed the Roma Holocaust, the genocide against the Romani people undertaken by the Nazis, especially in Poland and Hungary, as well as the specter of revived persecution of them in Eastern Europe today. Mortimer fashions a surrogate for herself in the person of a researcher called simply The Seeker, played by Loren O’Dair, who addresses the camera directly about her investigations of massacres of Roma people in the past. She was guided in her searches, she tells us, by the spirit of a Roma woman, voiced by Iveta Kokyová—the deathless woman of the title, who was shot and buried alive when enraged villagers wiped out her family because they were suspected, as an elderly witness explains in one of several interviews with locals, of stealing a pig. The interviewee further relates that when the woman’s body was dug up fifteen years later, it had not decomposed, and was reburied with care. Kokyová’s disembodied voice describes her rage over what her family and other Roma suffered during World War II, describing, in particular, the killing of more than a hundred Romani at Várpalóta in Hungary in 1945; another elderly interviewee describes being enlisted to dig a mass grave for them, which now lies under Lake Grabler, and Mortimer provides an eerie shot of the victims floating under the waters. The voice also takes us to the Roma barracks at Birkenau, where, she says, she instigated a riot. After the war, the woman’s spirit slumbered, but it has now been awakened by a resurgence of prejudice and persecution in the digital age. Her voice alludes to video games in which the players’ targets are Roma men fleeing as they shoot at them, and The Seeker interviews a Hungarian woman whose son was murdered, along with his wife, by a mob that set their house afire; their child was saved by pure chance. A long printed list of incidents of violence perpetrated against Roma over the years closes the film, emphasizing the magnitude of their suffering at the hands not just of the Nazis and their local sympathizers, but of neo-fascist nationalists today.  Mortimer’s film can be criticized for being so artful in its mixture of fact and legend that it is not always entirely clear which is which, but its impact is undeniable, and it remains an engrossing composite. Recommended. Aud: P, C. (F. Swietek)