The Film "Little Red Riding Hood"

[Zoran Tairovic]

Personal view

Zoran Tairović

Academic painter

1. How did this project get started?
This project is the
logical continuation of my quest as a painter. The feeling was always close to
the film theme, making pictures alive and with the help of this medium there
was a new happy side of my creative work. Logical. I have to say that I was
always frustrated with the malice of certain individuals in relation with the
Roma people. This was one of the basic creative provocations.

Presenting the Roma as wild beasts, the non-Roma population discredited the Roma culture both politically and in the field of social traditions. All this time the Roma have carried on with their characteristics in a romantic,
dreamlike and not at all lethargic way.

For the European art, the Roma art has always been invisible. And this is the reason for the film « CRVENKAPA » (Little Red Riding Hood). It is a gigantic fairy tale which eats humans, rips stomachs up, throws heroes in
the well and maltreats animals – it provokes the SYMBOLIC VALUE of differences
that is at the verge of schizophrenia and it is finally de-mystifying the
differences between THE ROMA AND THE EUROPEAN SYSTEM OF CULTURAL VALUES.

The Roma people do not have an inclination towards battles because they do not cry for bloody duels, and they do not need extermination fights. A Roma person does not feel antipathy or hatred against other people or foreign
heroes. The songs and music the Roma give others are neither heroic in their
typical or shrewd meaning nor egoistic to protect interests. So the life of the
Roma is neither a scream of blood and flesh nor an effusion of strong unruly
muscles or the primitive heroic hearts. On the contrary, the other, non-Roma
heroes are physically strong, they are physically super-humans. They are the
black legions – dragons with three heads and many hearts, breathing fire and
burning the enemies. The Roma people, they have only one heart, the heart of
faith, not the primitive one but that of spiritual and intelligent. This is why
the Roma are magnificent; fighting for truth and well-being, for justice, for
the universal goodness that finally defeats pain and sadness in every song.

So fearless in their faith they have travelled as nomads, had their own exodus, passed by heroes with strong muscles and stayed on in the world with their spirit and soul.

2. You mixed many different esthetics.

The tenth document from Kastal has definitely solved the question of composition and de-composition as well as the aesthetic question of STYLE, modern, post-modern,
modern-modern. The third industrial revolution brought the 21^st
century in the world of multimedia and thus pulled art into the streets.

The artistic reality becomes NOMADIC, DISORDERED, LIFE-LIKE.

An On-line civilization is emerging. Sartre is far away from Plato. We are dealing with the pedantry of the unison aesthetics. What a paradox! This is past time belonging to the 20th century.

For the Roma life is not what it had been for Shakespeare in his Macbeth – it is a non-sense, nervous and noisy story told by and idiot (Act V, sec. V). For the Roma life is a mission.
Therefore differences are secondary; the primal force is the cry of the soul.
Everything is in the game and everything is subordinate to the idea which
hardly reaches people.

3. The theatre is not very far, I would even say cabaret. Why?

I am glad that you have noticed that the theatre is the basic starting point of the film « CRVENKAPA ». Also, it has a sense of cabaret. The Roma are marked in the European mind as the necessary passers-by in the
European scene. Because of the production concept they stay aside having a role
with eye-catching masks on the scene which are quickly defined as Roma.

The discrimination of the Roma is based on prejudices and hatred and it is not connected with « individual capacity or with actual behaviour of individuals » at all. Every member of the Roma population is discriminated
and so is « a stigmatized and marginalized member of the society ».
Is not such a picture like a cabaret for the commonsense?

Many European authors presented the Roma as burlesque. And something else – they got prestigious movie awards for that. Trust me; it was in vain since the Roma are not like that.

Some European authors use the Roma as the paradigm of poverty. This only blurs the genuine picture of the Roma culture.

The world hangs to the culture of poverty because its characteristics are guiding the actual thinking and acting in the world.

Look and behold, poverty in its masses should be the initiator of racism, so in that view world could become a conspiracy of the hungry and the chilled, the singers and the beggars,
the outcast and the illegal.

Could this world accommodate the idea of the « Holocaust » as the carrier of violence? The Roma, being financially unprovided for and because of their differences, could not be the initiators of evil. They have never even
done so.

Placing them in a cabaret I put everything in the line of absurd.

4. Is the grotesque, even carnavalesque dimension was decided from the begining?

Of course, the grotesque is a necessary tool in the 21st century because of the problems accumulated. Interestingly enough, when the problem becomes clear the concept of
« Bread and Circus » opens up the concept of carnival. To refuse
poverty is to escape behind masks and dances behind the scenes. The Roma are
not people of carnivals. They do not need demystification because being
transcendent they live a real life.

A nation which has its own culture and tradition must not be inferior to others. The Roma are the elite instructors of nomads so it might be possible that this
century will warmly suggest the Roma culture of life and survival as a recipe
for curing the collapse of the spiritual Europe
and world. Carnivals are the privileges of other entities.

5. Most of your protagonists are Roms, and not actors.

What do I want to show with this film?

First of all, it is about different emotions shared with us by the amateur actors who in their own lives carry dramas. Thus, I have to talk about them first.

The Wolf is a Roma whose role is to be a Nazi, while in real life, in the ‘70s of the last century, he had worked as a printer in an illegal printing workshop in the outskirts of Vienna. There he took
part in the preparation work of Hitler’s Mein
Kampf so he really knew all about the book. Paradox, isn’t it?

The Grandmother in real life survived the holocaust, in very strange circumstances she stayed alive thanks to music and an accordion that she plays even today.

In the film appears Little Red Riding Hood, a hooker by the highway, who, in real life, is a graduate actress, and who passed her entrance exam telling a monologue from Chekhov’s Nina. She works at the Ministry of Human
and Ethnic Rights in Serbia.

The Hunter – vagabond is played by Božidar, a village musician who, after the fall of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, wanders in the region and thanks to his violin and singing he
gets money from people to survive.

So, the transcendent Roma become victims and a motive for executioners… The Wolf reminds us on the holocaust and on the victims of that industry of evil, the Grandmother is the female
principium which is dominating the Roma culture. This principium has its own
secrets that non-Roma regard as a fault… This is the basic quality of the Roma
value system. Grandmother, just as the Mother of Christ, is the lighthouse of
the faith long abandoned. Little Red Riding Hood carries the stigma of the
young Roma who are at the highway of the world which does not take care much of
their future.

6. We can hear many languages: Roma language, English, German... Their status, the circulation from one to the other?

Connecting the fairy tale and real life actors I opened up a space for analyzing the new dialogues of intercultural values. The various languages in the film present the linguistic
space representing the basic non-understanding between Europe
and the Roma people. The original speech, the optional title and the
simultaneous fake testifying… all is in the service of emphasizing the
phenomenon of truth, its interpretations and re-interpretations. The
transmission of information with symbolic pictures is to activate the viewers’
emotional intelligence which helps them to perceive the heroes in the
film.

And what do I want to show with this selection of heroes? Actually, what do I want to say with this system of signs which tells us about the disintegration of the
greatest ethnic minority in Europe, a
stigmatized minority that desperately wants to build a system of values in
order to de-stigmatize ethos? What do I want with this film which is on the
border of globalization and anti-globalization, and as a new form, a form of an
experimental genre, describes the world of the Roma, which became nomadic but
not because of their wish?

I wanted to say, first of all that a nation which has its own culture and tradition must not be inferior to others. The Roma are the elite instructors of nomads so it
might be possible that this century will warmly suggest the Roma culture of
life and survival as a recipe for curing the collapse of the spiritual Europe and world.

At birth, humans get a name and a surname in front of God, and then they become part of a community, a so called nation. The Roma has not taken part in
national states as constructors, but they were the victims of those
institutions. I wanted to make a film which shows the Roma thought of
composition, and I am afraid that it will not be understandable for non-Roma
viewers. The story is dislocated just as the Roma people are, out of the
context of reality, being evil scarecrows for the non-Roma world. In their own
style, the Roma are a transcendental resort with basic human values. The
disharmony of the film’s storyline is the essence of the Roma existence of the
world today.