The Deathless Woman is a documentary about the persecution of Roma framed around the legend of an undying Roma woman.
The unnamed woman was the pregnant wife of the leader of a group of Roma people in Poland during the 40s. When a pig went missing in the nearby village, a local man accused the Roma of the theft, and the Nazi occupiers massacred the whole community. The woman was shot and thrown in the unmarked mass grave, but in the legend, she does not die, becoming eternal in her rage, crying out for justice, for someone to bear witness to the suffering of her people.
The film starts with the buried woman narrating her story, and telling how she bewitches a London artist, subtly steering her towards uncovering her story. The artist, beset with omens, finding birds native to Poland dead her garden in England, begins to research the history of the Roma in the Holocaust. In Auschwitz, 21,000 Roma people were murdered, but on one night in May 1945, they rose up in defiance, turned on their Nazi guards, and refused to go to the gas chambers, a single act of extraordinary resistance in an impossible time. She visits a still and placid lake in Hungary, where over a hundred men, women and children lie in an unmarked mass grave hidden beneath the water.
The filmmaker uses the story of the search for the undying woman as a framing device for interviews with survivors. In Poland, a local man tells of when he was a teenager, being forced to dig the grave the Roma were thrown in after being shot. In Hungary a Roma woman tells how her mother, as a little girl, survived by hiding beneath her own mother’s body until after the shooting was done. Roma people speak of how present the fear still feels, that the majority will turn on them suddenly, and prejudice will catch alight into genocidal violence once more.
And as the film draws to a close, the quest becomes less about unearthing the deathless woman, but joining in her vigil, her eternal watch over her people, and sharing in her rage at the injustices done to them. It ends with the testimony of the mother of a man murdered in 2008 as part of a string of attacks by neo-Nazis on Roma people in Hungary. Separated by more than half a century, her story is eerily similar, the same elements, the guns, the fire, the chaos of not being able to find loved ones, the grief, the ash. Across Europe, the right is one the rise, and divisions and hatred are being stirred once more for political gain. The film asks us to keep watch.