Tony Gatlif
1993
103 minutes
This is a cleverly done musical "documentary" of sorts that tells the story of the Roma people (a.k.a. Gypsies) by following musical performances starting with their early roots in India through their travels through the mid-east and near-east and then ending with the diaspora that has landed as often-unwelcome migrants in western Europe. The music and scenery and dancing is gorgeous and it's a good way to treat your eyes and ears for an hour and a half or so.
As with all-too-many films, this will remind you of a woman--in particular, a woman you once dated who was part-Roma. Her mother was Italian and her father was a "gypsy". He split when she was a child and wasn't around much, so there wasn't a lot linking her to that culture besides her looks. She was an old art school punk with a particular affinity for ska, and she was one of a few women you went home with where the next day you had to look closely to figure out which pair of Doc Martens were hers and which were yours. You were particularly amused when you went home with this woman to find that her bed was entirely covered with stuffed animals, and she swore you to secrecy about this fact since it really didn't jibe with her public persona.
This woman had been an art student once, before taking a weird swerve into computer science and then going to work as a technician for the telephone company. As a bit of an old-school hacker yourself, you were greatly enthusiastic to hear her exploits in telephony, which were relatively square but still quite interesting. You were a regular reader of 2600, and she was well familiar with the old days of blue boxes and Cap'n Crunch whistles. You at least spoke the same language on this stuff, though she had much less of a "hacker" approach to things than you did and a bit of prudishness about doing anything wrong or unauthorized since people with your skills and philosophy tended to make her job more difficult. Most of her art career had been as a photographer. She was a disciple of Cindy Sherman, and much of her art was taking photos of herself in various costumes and makeup and unusual situations, back before selfies were cool. But before either of these things, weirdly enough, she had started as an agricultural sciences major before finding that this jibed poorly with her vegetarianism--but not in the way you would think. She was mostly a vegetarian for environmental purposes. She had no actual moral problem with eating animals themselves and she certainly didn't over-anthropomorphize them. But she did recognize that eating animals was strongly contributing to destroying our planet's environment and decided that it was immoral to prop up this industry.
Much of the culture she shared with you in your short time dating her was her Italian side, since that was mostly what she grew up with. Her mother taught her to make homemade mozzarella, which she demonstrated for you. But there was one notable instance in which her father crash-landed in her life with a vengeance. When she graduated high school, her father suddenly decided to turn up at her graduation party with all of her extended Roma family in tow. To her horror, they decided to roast a goat on a spit in her backyard. This did not go over well with the budding vegetarian punk girl and all her artsy friends, and she never lived it down.
Time to choose something different: