Lauren’s video diary

Stefano 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, however, they kept imagining working together on this project, each of them with different motivations and positionalities. 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 they could meet in Romania, where Lauren had eventually returned with his family. So, towards the end of 2020, Stefano sent him a smartphone and invited him to record his life. This video is Lauren’s diary of that period. Stefano’s chapter Combining Participatory and Audiovisual Methods with Young Roma Affected by Mobility (2021) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-67608-7_10 provides an ethnographic and reflexive account of the first audiovisual encounters and collaborations between Stefano and Lauren.

Website: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/superdiversity-institute/retry/index.aspx