Big City Gypsies

This film documents the daily lives of Roma in their winter quarters on the outskirts of Berlin, Germany. The film presents insights into the Roma's complex and often tumultuous society. When in 1932 László Moholy-Nagy shot his barely twelve minute-long experimental film, he confirmed the widespread image of the Roma as fortune tellers, musicians and trainers of dancing bears, but at the same time showed them as a happy and confident community. Moholy-Nagy could have had no idea that in only a few years the Roma, like the European Jews, would come into the crosshairs of Nazi extermination policy.