Cars, trains, the signs of modernity flicker at the edges of a Roma community seemingly lost in time. Funerals, kids going to school, adults riding bicycles home from work — fragments of Roma life in early 1960s Hungary, filmed poetically in harsh black and white film stock that works to distance them from contemporary life in both time and space. Yet contrapuntal close-ups of melancholy and resilient faces and occasional synch-sound interviews bring in an immediate empathetic dimension that counterbalances the anthropological, exoticizing vision characterizing the time’s few documentaries on Roma. This archival film produced at a time when interest in Roma started spreading among East and West European documentarians bears the marks of its time and points to the representation possibilities of the future. (by Mona Nicoară)