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Review: A People Uncounted – Toronto Jewish Film Festival 2012
KRISTAL COOPER
When Cher playfully sang about “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” back in 1971 there’s no way she could have known that despite the colourful depictions of the Romani people we’re used to seeing in film and on stage, they’re a people that have quickly become the most persecuted in the European Union. The film, which screens as part of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, tells the story of the monumental tragedy suffered by the estimated half million Roma who were systematically murdered by the Nazis during WWII. Through harrowing accounts by the survivors (one by a man who suffered terrible medical experiments at the hands of the infamous Nazi “doctor” Josef Mengele is especially heart wrenching), director Aaron Yeger pieces together the Roma history and aims to show the rest of the