Educational Media Reviews Online

How I Became a Partisan is an achingly personal documentary film following the filmmaker as she searches for information on her great grandfather, a Roma partisan in Czechoslovakia during World War II. The film uses quick cuts to historical footage set to dissonant music, heartbeats, and ragged breathing to create the effect of bringing memories to life and imbuing meaning onto objects such as historical paperwork and photographs. This approach, coupled with an overarching narrative following the director’s quest to publicize and document Roma participation in the partisans and resistance against the Nazis, makes the film almost uncomfortably close at times, inviting the viewer into personal, uncomfortable conversations and moments.

The showrunner employs recurring imagery of down feathers (referencing a family story of a massacre of her great grandfather’s family), connecting each part of the film to its personal genesis in family history. The film is partitioned by dates, following a chronological pathway through time as the filmmaker researches, creates displays, and talks with local politicians. This has the effect of showcasing the methodology of the documentary, highlighting how this sort of research plays out in real life, as well as showing breakthroughs and triumphs in the process. This sort of thing could be very dry, but the relentlessly personal style of the film centers the emotions, prejudices, and conflicts and makes it all very human and relatable.

From a classroom perspective this film touches on a wide variety of themes both specific and broad, including racial prejudice against the Roma, how prejudice can be internalized, transmitted, and systematized, the complex interplay of history and how it plays out within local communities, how historical research actually impacts the lives of people, how history can be politicized or used to fight back against prejudice, as well as showing the work involved in historical activism and how one person can in fact make a difference. With that said, the film loses a lot of its punch when it’s divided into clips or segments, as its power comes from the human focus on its subject/creator. This has a lot of potential as a major subject of analysis in a film class or history class touching on World War II, as well as broader potential for talking about historical activism using smaller clips.

How I Became a Partisan is highly recommended for any collection focusing on the Roma, on World War II, and any collection looking to stockpile resources useful for discussing prejudice or historical memory. Public libraries might find this a useful and entertaining addition if their patrons have an interest in activism, local history research, or documentaries in general.

Awards:
Prize for Cultural Diversity of the Federal Foreign Office, goEast Film Festival, Germany; Best Film, AKE DIKHEA? International Festival of Romani Film, Germany; National Film Prize IGRIC in the Category of Film and TV Production, Slovakia; Best Documentary, Tatra Bank Foundation Award for Audiovisual Art, TV and Radio, Slovakia; Tatra Bank Foundation Award for Audiovisual Art, TV and Radio, Slovakia; The Golden Kingfisher Award for Best Doc, Finále Plzeň Film Festival, Czech Republic

Published and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Anyone can use these reviews, so long as they comply with the terms of the license.