RUKELI by Alessandro Rak won the Italian Competition at Piccolo Festival Animazione.

The film tells the story of Johann Wilhelm Trollmann, known as Rukeli or Gypsy, who became middleweight champion in Nazi Germany, the first Romani boxer in the world to win the title. With the introduction of racial laws, he was imprisoned in the Wittenberge and Neuengamme concentration camps, where he died at the age of 37. He chose to die as a champion and fought against a Nazi kapo who challenged him. Rukeli, meaning tree, knocked out the Nazi and symbolically defeated the entire system of power.

The decision to make a short film was taken by the association Chi rom e chi no together with a group of young Roma and Italian participants within the international Tracer project on the Porrajmos Samudaripen, the Holocaust of Roma and Sinti people. We chose to adopt an individual point of view, focusing on the story of boxer Trollmann, in order to build a narrative through music and images that could have an emotional and poetic impact and reach the audience’s heart, creating an empathic bond and using memory to counter today’s discrimination, Nazism and Fascism, and anti-Gypsyism.

The Italian Competition was evaluated by the PFA18 Jury, made up of 13 members of the festival staff.