Taikon – The Untold Story of a Roma Freedom Fighter

Katarina Taikon has been compared to Martin  Luther King. She was born in a tent, and came to change the course of  Swedish history. The story about the young girl who was denied  education, learned to read in her late twenties, and later became one of  the most read authors of children’s books in Sweden, is also an account  of the emergence of the modern Swedish welfare society – and the one  group left behind: the Roma minority.

”I don’t know how people will react to my book, all I know is that it’s the  beginning of a long struggle.”

With those words Katarina Taikon stepped into the limelight. The year  was 1963 and her first book, Gypsy Woman, had just been  published. This was also the start of her lifelong struggle for human  rights for the Roma in Sweden, aiming to provide access to education,  long denied, and the closure of the tent and caravan camps where  Swedish citizens of Roma background were forced to live.

Katarina Taikon’s struggle in the 1960’s was hugely successful, but she  also became the target of vicious attacks from politicians as well as  ”ordinary people”.

In the 1970’s Katarina Taikon started writing the autobiographical  series of children’s books about the young Roma girl, Katitzi. The  sequence became a huge success and was the most read children’s  books in Sweden second only to Astrid Lindgren’s international  successes Pippi Longstocking. A whole generation of children in Sweden  grew up reading the books about Katitzi.

The documentary paints a dramatic and vivid portrait of one of the most  important advocates of human rights in 20th century Europe, set  against the backdrop of the developing Swedish welfare state.