AKE DIKHEA? 2026: Carmen Baltzar’s All the Love in My Body Wins Best Film Award
Carmen Baltzar’s short film All the Love in My Body received the Best Film Award at the 10th edition of AKE DIKHEA? – International Festival of Romani Film, held in Berlin from 17 to 20 September 2026. The award recognises a film that confronts the representation of Roma lives and asks difficult questions about visibility, memory and the ethics of looking.
Set on a sunny tourist beach in Greece, All the Love in My Body follows Nadia and Samara, two young Romani sisters selling wooden turtles to holidaymakers. Through the girls’ perspectives, the film observes the everyday encounters between the sisters and the people spending their day at the beach. Their world is shaped by work, boredom, playfulness and curiosity, until an unexpected turn changes the course of the day.
Written and directed by Carmen Baltzar, the 2026 short film is a Finnish-Greek production featuring Christina Konstantina Louka and Dimitra Louka. Rather than reducing its protagonists to symbols, the film attends to their lives and experiences, inviting viewers to encounter them as individuals within a wider social reality.
The film also addresses a deeply troubling real-life event: the drowning of two young Romani girls at Torregaveta, near Naples, in 2008, and the public circulation of images of their deaths. Baltzar approaches this history through research, archival material and filmmaking, redirecting attention towards the girls’ lives and the hours preceding the tragedy rather than reproducing images of their deaths.
In doing so, All the Love in My Body raises questions that extend beyond cinema. Who has the authority to represent Roma lives? What happens when images of marginalised people circulate publicly without regard for their dignity? And who gets to determine how Roma histories are remembered and told?
These questions resonate with the wider concerns of AKE DIKHEA? Under the theme “Breaking the Spell,” the festival’s tenth edition examined the stereotypes and myths imposed on Roma and Sinti communities, and explored how Romani filmmakers can challenge inherited narratives through their own artistic practices. The festival creates space for stories that contest external representations and foreground the complexity of Romani experiences.
ERCF was represented on the 2026 festival jury by Timea Junghaus, alongside Sejad Ademaj, Ömer Alkin and Benjamin Menekshe. The jury’s work formed part of a festival dedicated to the visibility, diversity and artistic perspectives of Romani cinema.
By bringing the lives of two young sisters into focus, All the Love in My Body demonstrates how filmmaking can engage with painful histories without allowing the images associated with them to define the people at their centre. Its recognition at AKE DIKHEA? highlights the importance of artistic freedom and of Romani filmmakers shaping the ways their communities are seen, remembered and represented.
Film: All the Love in My Body
Writer and director: Carmen Baltzar
Production: Finland and Greece, 2026
Running time: 14 minutes
Award: Best Film Award, 10th AKE DIKHEA? International Festival of Romani Film, Berlin, 2026
More information: AKE DIKHEA? – International Festival of Romani Film
