Medeia Nimas Cinema
Saturday, November 20th, after screening 11h
In 1749, king Ferdinand IV from Spain approved a plan to get rid of the gypsy population in Spain, known as the “Gran Redada” – the Great Gypsy Round-up. The strategy aimed at exterminating the community consisted in the imprisonment of Roma people, separated by sex in order to avoid any possibility of procreation. From the 11.000 registered Roma people in Spain, 9.000 were arrested. This tragical moment of Rom people’s history in the Iberian Peninsula follows centuries of prejudice, in which myths and anti-gypsy legislation contributed to the construction of an image of this community as the cause of all societal evil and vice. Revisiting this forgotten period of Iberian history, LEFFEST welcomes historian Manuel Martínez Martínez and Professor Araceli Cañadas Ortega to discuss the political treatment of the Rom population from the end of Al-Andaluz up to the “Gran Redada”. This session also includes a reading of Federico García Lorca’s poems by poet Ana Luísa Amaral.