The Deathless Woman

Full Film Synopsis

The Deathless Woman is a ghost story for the 21st Century.

When a series of uncanny events lead The Seeker to a forest in Poland she meets Zofia, a distraught elderly woman who hands her a note written in Polish that she cannot understand. Returning months later with an interpreter she hears the story of The Deathless Woman, a Roma matriarch who was buried alive in the forest by German soldiers in 1942. The Deathless Woman begins to haunt The Seeker, leading her and us on an other-worldly and emotionally-charged journey from the Nazi era to the present day, revealing stories of genocide and resistance that have been omitted from the history books.

The Deathless Woman’s narrative draws us from the scene of her death to other sites of Roma persecution. She hovers above the Gypsy Camp at Birkenau on the night the Roma revolt against their Nazi captors. She glides under the man-made lake in Várpalota that covers the land where 118 women and children were massacred in 1945. She passes through the burnt-out house in Tatárszentgyörgy where neo-Nazis murdered a Roma family in 2009. She crosses the border into the virtual realm of digital landscapes of the Internet, encountering hate speech and Olah Action, a racist ‘shoot-em-up’ video game where in 2005 players were invited to gun down unarmed Roma as they ran through the streets. This urgent and magical hybrid documentary fluidly interweaves fantastical re-imaginings of buried secrets with a ghostly narration and direct to camera testimony from survivors and witnesses of historic and contemporary crimes against the Roma in Poland and Hungary.

Find out more on this website https://thedeathlesswoman.com/

Press Pack “The Deathless Woman”
(2020, pdf download)