Rukeli

Synopsis

Johann Wilhelm Trollmann becomes middleweight champion in Nazi Germany. He is the first Sinto in world boxing to win this title. He is famous for his fighting style, which resembles a dance. With the enactment of the racial laws, he is stripped of his title, separated from his wife and daughter, subjected to chemical castration, and imprisoned in the Wittenberge and Neuengamme concentration camps, where he will die at age 37. Before he dies, reduced to a skeleton, he fights for the last time with a Nazi kapo who recognizes and challenges him. Against all odds, Rukeli, the Gipsy, knocks out the Nazi and with him the entire apparatus of power he represents. The next day he will be punished and killed for it, but Rukeli had decided to die a champion.

The short film is part of the European project Tracer, Transformative Roma Art and Culture for European Remembrance, led by the Department of Educational Sciences at the University of Bologna. The project aims to rediscover the memory of the genocide of Roma and Sinti during Nazism. The idea was developed in Scampia, a northern suburb of Naples, through workshops by the Chi Rom e…chi no association, with the active involvement of a group of Roma and Neapolitan youth.

Production Facts

Directed by the renowned Italian director and animator Alessandro Rak. (“L'arte della felicità“ – Venice 2013, “Gatta Cenerentola” – Venice 2017, “Yaya e Lennie – The Walking Liberty” – Annecy 2021)

Produced by Parsifal Reparato in co-production with Samir Arabzadeh and Fredrik Svensson, Sideways Studios and Film i Väst.

Photo: AntropicA