Grappling with a Roma identity
VIDEO
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7591669.stmLife on the Edge: Looking for my Gypsy roots
By Steve Bradshaw
Executive Producer,
Life on the Edge
BBC NEWS
It was just a passing remark, the first time I heard Arpad Bogdan talk about the Roma father who had left him
in an orphanage, and wonder if he should try to find him.
Arpad Bogdan spent his childhood in a state orphanage
We were drinking late at night in a semi-derelict house in a Budapest side street. We had skipped over bicycles and rubbish to make our way inside. I should say this was not a doss house but a trendy Urban Minimalism club.
"He doesn't have to tell you this you know," whispered our mutual friend, director Antonia Meszaros. And it was then that I realised how conflicted Arpad is - how much of a dilemma his Roma inheritance has created.
Arpad is a much-garlanded young film director, whose feature film Happy New Life has won many awards. It is about a young Roma man's unbearable childhood in an orphanage. In the end, he can't hack it - unlike Arpad who emerged from his own orphanage into the University of Pecs and a promising film career.
"My film," Arpad says, "is about the dilemmas of someone who realises that in order to face the future, he must come to terms with his past - and that's something that I still have to do in my own life."
Arpad was one of thousands of Roma - or gypsy - children who were taken into orphanages during Hungary's Communist years. The truth is cloudy here, but it seems that in some cases their parents wanted this, in many they didn't.
