Film screening and discussion: Extracts from the film Dislocations- Eviction Routes to Cantonului street

Speakers: Maria Stoica, Linda Greta, Enikő Vincze (Social Housing NOW!), Eugen Ghiță (RomaJust) – moderator: George Zamfir 

“Dislocations” is a documentary that illustrates how post-socialist policies have led to the dispossession of the right to housing of impoverished people in Cluj, including the Roma. Before 1990, Roma people belonged to the working class and, in the context of the formation of capitalism in Romania, they were affected by a process of precarisation in both the world of work and that of housing. Ionica, Leontina, Babi, Sandu, Ligia, Katalin and Gelu have attempted to map their successive dislocations by inscribing them in time and space between 1996 and 2016. In the end, they found themselves in Cantonului Street, without a number.

After the screening of the film, there was a discussion on anti-racist struggles and struggles for the right to housing and to the city. Romanian policies on the right to housing were presented as policies that exclude Roma from cities and tolerate them in areas that are not currently of interest to the market. Pata Rat, for example, is an area close to the city embankment that is now home to around 1,500 people living in ghettoised conditions.