Thanks to Gică’s mediation, I met Colorado for the first time here in Berlin in early 2015. He and I became colleagues and, together with another colleague, we supervised a temporary project of the Amaro Foro association, offering counselling for the Romanianspeaking residents of a piece of junk real estate that made headlines in Berlin at the time. It was a project that, in my view, would not have been possible without Colorado.

Eventually, Colorado told me that he and Philip Scheffner and Merle Kröger were working on a new film project, completely different from ‚Revision‘, not just formally, but also in terms of content. The film’s central depiction of painful experiences with racist and German conditions, the arc that the film describes from the 1990s to the present, impressed me. I was curious about what would follow – and I wasn’t disappointed.

Colorado, his children and other relatives filmed at self-chosen moments, in which the camera was always a conscious part of the depictions. Obvious efforts at targeted staging and viewing previously shot film material are part of the story. There are several levels of filming within the film. And when the participants reflect aloud on formal aspects, the course of action or their own roles, beautiful and sometimes very comical moments arise. The narrative fragments of the individual family members, who are often filming themselves, are held together by Colorado: his diary entries form a kind of narrative framework that simultaneously offers a very intimate access to the man depicted. Ultimately, the political dimension of AND-EK GHES… lies in the existential questions that often surface here for Colorado and his family as Roma from Romania.