Offering intriguing anthropological insight into the background and current circumstances of one of Europe’s remaining nomadic ethnic groups, Ruäch – A Journey into Yenish Europe (Ruäch – Eine Reise ins Jenische Europa) also provides an appropriately oblique and complex look into a community whose members often seem reluctant to discuss the secrets and complexities of their culture.
Travelling in a battered RV, the filmmaking team of Andreas Müller and Simon Guy Fässler head through Europe in search of the Yenish, their film being a resolutely anti-folkloric examination of a community infatuated by freedom but still marked by the wounds of the past.
The origins of the Yenish are not entirely clear. Traditionally they make their living by plying their trade as itinerant artisans, travelling sales people and artists. Parts of the Yenish language and culture have been documented since the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, as the film prosaically states, “other traces are lost in the darkness of history.”
The filmmakers are warned that some of the Yenish are scared by the prospect of being interviewed and that they want to retain the secret of their language. Over the years they have often been labelled thieves and layabouts, but the filmmakers are determined to track down community members and gently befriend them.
One Yenish person they meet tells them: “You have to know with a film like the one you’re making, a great deal comes to light…and most people are still afraid today. Of the authorities and of everything. They are still afraid today…you have to be extremely careful.”
A Yenish who speaks to them on the phone adds: ”They are freeborn people. It used to be said ‘the free nobility,’ that’s what the Yenish used to be called. And do you know what a freeman meant in the Middle Ages? The freeman was always between two places. Always changing from one thing to another, always on the move, oscillating.”
But Müller and Fässler are nothing if not determined, and they gradually start to meet some “settled” Yenish, drawing out aspects of Yenish history and their personal stories. Whereas travelling was once their default setting, these days many have now become sedentary, some out of necessity.
They have been exposed to the most severe discrimination, with children taken away from them in years gone by who are still fighting for recognition today. Some of the Yenish the filmmakers meet are still driven by tradition and folklore – a couple they meet show how open scissors are kept under a mat facing outwards so witches cannot come in, while garlic hangs from the walls to ward off spirit.
The filmmakers travelled with these members of the community for six years, to the extent that they even adopted a nomadic aspect of their own lifestyle. The good-natured ignorance and otherness of the “gadjo” filmmakers is an integral part of the film’s structure as they put themselves into the film and gently engage in conversation, with the camera recording the subtle changes in mutual perception.
The film is perhaps a little too languid as the filmmakers set about their journey of investigation and discovery, but embedding themselves within the community is crucial to the task of gently and compassionately telling the story of a modern-day Yenish Europe that stretches from dusty banlieues of France to the forests of Carinthia in the Austrian Alps.
Switzerland, 2023, 118mins
Dir: Andreas Müller, Simon Guy Fässler
Production: soap factory GmbH, 8horses
Producer: Frank Matter
Scr: Andreas Müller, Simon Guy Fässler, Marcel Bächtiger
Cinematography: Simon Guy Fässler
Editor: Marcel Bächtiger
