Authors
I Wodzka1; 1 University College London, UK Discussion
While much have been written about queer communities across the world, including Black queers, very little academic and social attentions has focused on queer Roma. Even less so from a film/media studies perspective as representations of LGBTQ+ people who also identify as Roma, Sinti, Gypsy or Traveller are indeed very sparse. Therefore, this presentation seeks to widen the current corpus of research across film and media studies, as well queer studies and gender studies, by looking in-depth at one of the recent films portraying non-heteronormative non-Western male identities. Brothers of the Night (2017, dir. Patric Chiha) is a genre-defying fiction documentary which depicts a community of Bulgarian Roma sex workers in Vienna, all of them male and self-identifying as heterosexual although working in a gay establishment. Using queer studies, decolonial appraoch and human geography, with particular emphasis on space and time, I analyse how the film shifts and contest the popular, stereotyped cinematic representation of Roma men, their assumed hyper-masculinity as well as homonormative and Western-centric notions of queerness. Through its original aesthetic, narrative structure, embeddedness in reality, and hybrid genre, the film departs from binary understanding of sexuality and identity, offering instead new ways of portraying Eastern European queer and marginalised identities on screen. 
