Grappling with a Roma identity

By Steve Bradshaw
Executive Producer, Life on the Edge

It was just a passing remark, the first time I heard Arpad Bogdan talk about the Roma father who had left him in an orphanage, and wonder if he should try to find him.

We were drinking late at night in a semi-derelict house in a Budapest side street. We had skipped over bicycles and rubbish to make our way inside. I should say this was not a doss house but a trendy Urban Minimalism club.

"He doesn't have to tell you this you know," whispered our mutual friend, director Antonia Meszaros. And it was then that I realised how conflicted Arpad is - how much of a dilemma his Roma inheritance has created.

Arpad is a much-garlanded young film director, whose feature film Happy New Life has won many awards. It is about a young Roma man's unbearable childhood in an orphanage. In the end, he can't hack it - unlike Arpad who emerged from his own orphanage into the University of Pecs and a promising film career.

"My film," Arpad says, "is about the dilemmas of someone who realises that in order to face the future, he must come to terms with his past - and that's something that I still have to do in my own life."

Arpad was one of thousands of Roma - or gypsy - children who were taken into orphanages during Hungary's Communist years. The truth is cloudy here, but it seems that in some cases their parents wanted this, in many they didn't.

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