Sociologist, director, curator of the Film Section.
Katalin Bársony is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and executive director of the Budapest-based Roma media organisation, the Romedia Foundation. She also heads BAXT Films, a company which creates films, social media campaigns and other tools to promote Roma self-representation.
She has used her deep understanding of minority issues and her expertise in sociology to create the first-ever documentary series on Roma communities around the world to be broadcast on a mainstream television channel (Duna Television in Hungary). The series Mundi Romani – the World through Roma Eyes was broadcast monthly between 2007 and 2011 (with forty-two episodes shot in twenty-eight countries) and won recognition worldwide for its innovative quality, cinematography and the untold stories the films uncovered. In 2010, the Mundi Romani series was awarded the UNESCO Prize for the Rapprochement of Cultures. Awards and nominations at the Monte Carlo Television Festival, the International Festival of Audiovisual Programmes (FIPA), the CIVIS Prize, etc., led to the creation of independent media campaigns such as the ‘I’m a Roma Woman’ campaign and film projects such as Uprooted (2011), which was nominated at the 8th Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival, as well as the upcoming documentary drama Three Brothers (to be released in 2019).
Under Bársony’s direction, the Romedia Foundation created BUVERO, a two-week residential summer camp for young Roma women that focuses on media training. Each year twenty girls from three countries learn how to make films and produce new media content. Between 2013 and 2016, eighty-six Romani women were trained in BUVERO methodology.
In 2012, Romedia organised the Budapest leg of Requiem for Auschwitz to commemorate Roma victims of Nazi terror. The programme included a concert, a film festival and an art exhibition.
Katalin Bársony is currently working on two feature-length documentary films: 3 Brothers tells the story of a German Roma family torn apart by forced ‘repatriation’ to Kosovo. The film is in post-production. Jazz Way Out, a co-production with HBO Europe which started work in 2015, follows a Roma composer and pianist who has created a new style of music fusing traditional rhythms with contemporary jazz. Jazz Way Out will be released in 2018/19.
Katalin Bársony is completing her doctoral dissertation in communications and behavioural science at Budapest’s Corvinus University. She is also a Miegunyah Fellow of the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne.
Filmography – director
Feature-length documentaries
2018 Jazz Way Out (in post-production, to be released)
2019 3Brothers (in production, to be released)
2020 The Caravan’s Trail (in development, to be released)
Short documentaries
Mundi Romani – The World through Roma Eyes, documentary series (27 minutes), 2007–2011
www.mundiromani.com
2007 India I-II
2007 Saintes Maries de la Mer – Sarah’s Christening
2007 Saintes Maries de la Mer – the Pilgrimage
2007 The Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art
2007 Macedonia
2007 The Guca Trumpet Festival
2007 The Maya Family
2007 Eastern Hungary – The Music of Parno Graszt
2008 Trapped – The Forgotten Story of the Mitrovica Roma
2008 Jerusalem – The Domari of the Middle East
2008 Timisoara
2008 Brussels – International Roma Day
2008 Lashi Vita
2008 Ukraine 2008 – School Segregation
2008 Roma in Turkey – The Untold Struggle
2008 The Last Days of Sulukule
2009 South Serbia’s Empty Roads
2009 The Roma Intelligentsia
2009 Roby Lakatos – A Portrait
2009 Ferenc Snétberger – A Portrait
2009 Hate on the Rise
2009 Children of Selita
2009 Filipas and Leftenia
2009 Shelter and Palace
2009 Romani Waltzer
2010 Faces of Change
2010 Montenegro
2010 Bosnia and Herzegovina
2010 The Merchants of Cordoba
2010 Voices of Jerez
2010 Szendrőlád Confessions
2010 Walls of Shame
2010 The Romen Theater
2010 Guilty until Proven Innocent
2010 Roma in Russia
2011 Mundi Romani’s Musical Journey from India to America
2011 The Kosovo Diaspora
2011 Rahim Burhan – A Portrait
2011 International Roma Day
2011 Coimbra Destinies
2011 Roma in Portugal
2011 Off the Beaten Path – Stories of the Balkan Roma
2010 Views from the Ground – The EU and Roma in the Western Balkans
2011 Uprooted – Children’s Perspectives on Europe’s Repatriation Policies
2018 RomArchive Film section – The Methodology
Campaigns
2009 I’m a Roma Woman campaign
2010 I’m a Roma Woman campaign for the western Balkans
2010 Common Action to Build Hope campaign
2010 Guilty until Proven Innocent – Roma and the State of France campaign
2018 Aven Amenca – Inclusive education in Ostrava
Filmography – producer
2012–2015 BUVERO short series
2012 Pages of My Book, directed by Galya Stoyanova