Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow Stefano Piemontese, from the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS), started filming Lauren's life in 2014.
At that time, Lauren was a teenager living in precarious housing conditions on the outskirts of Madrid, and Stefano was a PhD candidate working on youth migration. Their experimental collaborations continued for a couple of years. Then Stefano's doctoral scholarship ended, and the possibility to produce a collaborative documentary movie went on stand-by.
"Over the years, we kept imagining working together on this project, each of us with different motivations and positionalities," says Stefano. Finally, the opportunity presented itself with the EU-funded project "Resilience and Resignation among Transnational Roma and non-Roma Youths" (RETRY, 2019-2022). "Unfortunately, the pandemic broke out shortly before we could meet in Romania, where Lauren had eventually returned with his family", Stefano explains. "So, towards the end of 2020, I sent him a smartphone and invited him to record his life." This video is Lauren's diary of that period.
Camera and script – Lauren Ionescu
Production – Stefano Piemontese
Editing – Jérôme Walter Gueguen
Subtitles – Emily Churchill Zaraa
Stefano's chapter "Combining Participatory and Audiovisual Methods with Young Roma Affected by Mobility" (2021) provides a detailed account of the first audiovisual encounters and collaborations between Stefano and Lauren.
