Marie Dumora

After the Second World War, the town of Colmar in northeast France granted Roma families a vacant plot caught between vines and railway tracks. In 2010, the local council wanted to take back the land the people who had made it their home nicknamed “La Place” to develop a housing project that would include homes for the Roma community.
And so began the battle to save La Place and its way of life. Director Marie Dumora got up close and personal with her camera to record the everyday joys, fantasy, misery and freedom without any sense of contradiction. By capturing this displacement through her lens, the documentary filmmaker explores the nomadic lifestyle, so hard to understand and accept, threatened by a policy intended to force them to settle.