How might one make a film when there is nothing visible left, nothing to film?

Eight years in the making, the film The Deathless Woman was created in response to an absence of social or historical acknowledgement of the genocide of the Roma people during WWII. Starting with field research and employing a sensory response to place and people things took a surprising turn with a series of uncanny events that led to the development of a methodology that brought the fantastical into a direct relationship with this traumatic history. In this film the ghost of a Roma woman murdered by soldiers in 1942 leads us to not only engage with the buried past, but to understand its legacy – the ongoing xenophobia against the Roma in Europe today.

Roz Mortimer has an MA in Visual Sociology (Goldsmiths) and a PhD in Hybrid Documentary Practice (Westminster). Her work is focused on documentary forms that encompass re-enactment, trauma cinema, and the spectral turn. Through this, she has been exploring the historical marginalisation of the Roma and the rise of the far right in contemporary Europe through a long engagement with Roma communities, post-conflict landscapes and witness testimony.

thedeathlesswoman.com