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Leaving to Remain (12A)
Directed by Mira Erdevicki
SET against the backdrop of Britain’s hardening immigration policy this fly-on-the-wall documentary centres on three Roma living in Britain and shows the impact of Covid and Brexit on their lives while aiming to change people’s prejudicial view of them.
Five years in the making, director Mira Erdevicki follows Ondrej Olah, Denisa Gannon and Petr Torak from Slovakia and the Czech Republic who agreed to film themselves, mostly via mobile phones, once the country went into lockdown.
The end result is an intimate but captivating portrait of three people who escaped racism back home for a life full of possibilities and without discrimination and racial prejudice where they are valued for their actions and the people they are, and not their race.
At the start of the film Ondrej, who is 19, is working as a teaching assistant at his old secondary school Babington Academy in Leicester which has 1,200 pupils from 89 countries around the world at the time of filming. He reveals how, because he was Roma, he was sent to a special needs school in Slovakia where they segregate Roma children from Slovak kids. On a visit to Babington Academy the Slovak education secretary is surprised and asks how come the Roma/Slovak youngsters are flourishing so well academically unlike back home. It is a jaw-dropping scene.
The answer, of course, is because for the first time they have access to mainstream education, teachers that care and where all students are treated equally. But even to ask the question beggars belief.
By the end of the film Ondrej is married and has obtained a first in his psychology degree with a view to studying for his masters. Denisa has gone from being a cleaner to the becoming the country’s first Roma lawyer, and is working as an immigration solicitor helping people through the nightmare of application for EU Settlement Status. And Petr becomes the first Honorary Consul for the Czech Republic of Roma origin, thanks to his police work and his role at a community charity, and is based in Peterborough.
The film shows how inclusion and humanity transforms lives and hopefully it will change hearts and minds about Gypsies and immigrants in general who are not the criminals or evil beings portrayed by this Tory government.
Out in cinemas today
