Video 4/3, couleur, son, 11min

Watch the movie. (restricted access)

In 2005, Florence Lazar attended a meeting in Novi Sad organized by the Serbian Centre for Antiwar Action (CAA). The CAA was seeking to establish a dialogue between Serbs and Albanians from Kosovo and to support minorities and refugee communities in Serbia. The centre was founded in 1991 by Sonja Biserko, a leading figure in the struggle in Serbia for human and minority rights. During the meeting the artist met the film’s protagonist, a member of the Hungarian Rom minority from the autonomous province of Vojvodina – the only remaining autonomous province in Serbia following Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008. With a majority Serb population, Vojvodina is unique in Europe as a home to at least twenty coexisting minorities and six official languages.
The narrator in Le Lieu de la langue examines and comments on the diversity of Rom dialects in the region and surrounding countries, gradually in- validating the reasoning that belonging to the Roma community depends on what language is spoken—a reasoning that runs counter to the fact that a language does not always coincide with a given territory. The more the narrator maps the different Roma dialects, the more his geopolitical understanding of languages reveals territories of exclusion and sources of discrimination within the Roma community.