Die Polizei hat sich schuldig gemacht

In collaboration with RomaniPhen, we produced the documentary The Police Are Guilty – The History of the Criminalisation of Sinti and Roma and the Resistance Against It.

In the film, civil rights activists Anita Awosusi and Ilona Lagrene recount the role of the police and their crimes against Sinti and Roma during National Socialism, as well as the continuities after 1945. Activist Fatima Hartman speaks about a large-scale police raid against refugee Roma in Cologne in 1995 and her political work to expose and challenge the incident. The protagonists reflect on their forms of resistance against the ongoing criminalisation of Sinti and Roma from the postwar period into the 1990s. The documentary was conceived as a critical intervention addressing the absence of Romani histories and perspectives in current debates on police violence. Find out more about the project.

The film develops a hybrid visual language combining archival fragments, hand-drawn illustration, and interviews to address the historical and ongoing criminalisation of Sinti and Roma. Combining the elements literally on a table both digitally and by hand, allowing for a flexible interplay between abstraction and figuration. Archival materials are not simply illustrated but recontextualised through drawing, creating connections between past and present while making gaps and omissions visible. The voice-over by RomaniPhen guides the narrative and situates the images within a perspective shaped by lived experience and political practice. Rather than reproducing dominant visual regimes, the film seeks to create its own means of representation –foregrounding memory, resistance, and the continuity of structural violence.