Resistance is a young woman who is asking for her rights. She has different names and comes from Ferentari, Kyrgyzstan or Buryatia. She is determined, authentic, and changing the world.
“The fact that I know there is a girl in Buryatia, in Timișoara or in Ukraine fighting with all her passion and love for building a better, more just world gives me hope. I hope I managed to honour the stories of these young women and I hope they will reach people who need to hear and see them. To write and direct these video works that are inspired by true stories gave me courage as a woman, as a Roma person, as an artist, as a human being who continues to fight.
Moreover, I am happy that together with my colleague Zita Moldovan – the designer of the costumes used in the videos – we managed to give space to Roma artists and put them in the spotlight. Young voices who, themselves, are ready to resist in the face of patriarchal violence, racism and other forms of oppression.
I want a world where girls and non-binary persons are celebrated, supported and encouraged to achieve their maximum potential. And, when they reach it, the world will look completely different” Mihaela Drăgan
Girls’ fights are almost systematically – and oftentimes intentionally – shadowed and hidden from view, but history will never be able to erase their voices.
We created a video series consisting of eleven Stories of Girls’ Resistance to tell the inspirational, unfiltered and complex stories of girls who fight back and imagine better worlds; for themselves and for the societies they live in.
The stories were documented in November 2020 through interviews with young activists coming from different countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. These conversations were the foundation of the scripts created by Mihaela Drăgan, who is also the one who created the artistic concept of the project. These (hi)stories were brought to life by ten Roma artists from Romania.
Each of the 11 video-art pieces is a possibility to look at society and the world through the protagonists’ eyes; what does it mean, for example, to create your own entertainment show for your LGBTQIA+ community when there is no representation whatsoever in the mass-media? How do you feel when you make trap that is very successful on Tik Tok, but there’s still a lot of people who send you back to the kitchen just because you are a Roma woman in the music industry? What’s it like to fight for girls’ access to education? Or what’s it like when a bullying episode in school makes you realise you want to become a performer and write therapeutic lyrics?
This is the power of Art. This is the Power of Resistance. And, we invite you to feel it by reading the scripts of the 11 videos. We trust that our Resistance will change the world, at least a little bit. And we invite you to let yourself be changed by these models of resistance.
