ERCF’s Timea Junghaus Served on the Jury of the 10th AKE DIKHEA? Roma Film Festival
The European Roma Cultural Foundation (ERCF) delegated Timea Junghaus to serve as a jury member at the 10th anniversary edition of AKE DIKHEA?, the International Festival of Romani Film, held from 17 to 20 September 2026 at SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA in Berlin.
Under the motto “Breaking the Spell,” the festival turned its attention to the myths surrounding Romani people and asked a fundamental question: who benefits when a people is treated as mysterious rather than human? What happens when Romani filmmakers reclaim stereotypes created to exoticise and frighten them — bending, mocking, dismantling them, or replacing projections with lived memories?
Superstition works by keeping its subject unknowable. It thrives on distance. Film does the opposite: it brings audiences closer, into homes and families, and into lived experiences where myths cannot easily survive contact with individual lives. This was one of the central ideas of the festival’s programme: stories that refused to be reduced to symbols, told by the people those symbols were created to represent.
The films explored these questions from different directions. Some confronted longstanding stereotypes directly, turning myths designed to inspire fear back on those who had created them. Others turned towards the rituals, warnings and quiet forms of magic that continue to shape Romani family life — not as something to be embarrassed about or explained away, but as forms of knowledge with their own logic, care and truth.
In this sense, Breaking the Spell was not the opposite of dreaming. It could be understood as one of its oldest forms.
Intersectionality also remained central to the festival’s approach. Superstition does not affect all Romani people in the same way, and the selection made space for Romani women’s perspectives, LGBTQI+ voices and stories that challenged any single, flattened understanding of Roma and Sinti identities.
To believe with courage also means refusing the myths others have imagined about us. Through its films and conversations, the 10th AKE DIKHEA? Roma Film Festival invited audiences to look closely, question inherited assumptions and reconsider the stories told about Romani people.
The European Roma Cultural Foundation was proud to be represented by Timea Junghaus on the festival’s jury.
Festival website: https://akedikhea.com/
