Close Up

26 February 2023: I Even Met Happy Gypsies

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I Even Met Happy Gypsies
Aleksandar Petrovic, 1967, 82 min
UK premiere of the new restoration

Introduction by Ehsan Khoshbakht

I Even Met Happy Gypsies is the progenitor of all the Yugo-gypsy movies that came after it, most notably Emir Kusturica’s The Time of the Gypsies and Goran Paskaljevic’s Guardian Angel, neither of which even recapture the raw authenticity of Petrovic’s acutely observed and felt picture. Alexander Petrovic, one of the grand old men of the Yugoslav cinema who died shortly after completing his epic Migrations, enjoyed the only major international success of his career with I Even Met Happy Gypsies, which was nominated for Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1967, as was Petrovic’s Three on the previous year. (…) 

In all of Happy Gypsies, there is not a single happy gypsy – the title is an ironic quote from a traditional tzigane tune. [The film] depicts, with melancholy and muted colour, the odd, anachronistic ways of all-but-forgotten people. On the Pannonian plain near Belgrade, a colony of gypsies dwell in a clot of squalor, surviving on what they earn from buying and selling goose feathers. Outstanding among them is an erotic, intemperate feather merchant named Bora, played by Bekim Fehmiu, a Yugoslav actor strongly reminiscent of Jean-Paul Belmondo. Endlessly indulging in wife-beating and mistress-bedding, Bora downs litres of wine and scatters his seed, his feathers, and his future. As the film’s principal character, he meanders from confined hovels to expansive farm fields, from rural barrooms to the streets of Belgrade. Wherever he travels, he witnesses – and sometimes acts out – the gypsies’ heritage of violence and tragedy, providing the viewer with astonishing glimpses of a rapidly vanishing life.” – Mike Downey


Never on Sunday is a series of screenings of rare classics, archive masterpieces, obscure delights and forgotten gems carefully curated and introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht and taking place the last Sunday of each month at Close-Up.