Aferim! is a black-and-white period piece, set in the Ottoman era (the title is a Turkish word meaning “bravo”). The script plays on archaic folk idioms, the cruelty is gratuitous and the comedy unbearably crude, jarring with the film’s pristine landscape photography — the work of veteran cinematographer Marius Panduru. To cap it all, the film is an unabashed homage to a genre far removed from the New Wave’s granular realism: the classic American western. In the urgency of its subject matter and the boldness of its execution, Aferim! makes even its domestic contemporaries seem docile.

The action unfolds amongst the rolling hills of the Romanian province of Wallachia in the 1830s. Aging constable Constadin (New Wave stalwart Teodor Corban) and his feckless son Ioniță (newcomer Mihai Comănoiu) travel on horseback across the county, seeking out the fugitive Roma slave Carfin (Cuzin Toma), accused of having seduced the wife of a local nobleman. As they clip-clop indolently through fields and rivers, Constadin unleashes a barrage of vitriol, often in the form of sing-song folkloric couplets, while a cast of supporting characters, from racist priests to sex workers, heaves into view. And always the same refrain is repeated: it is Romanians, not the cuffed, beaten and indentured Roma who are the real victims. Aferim! is a film with much to say about the plight of the Roma in contemporary Romania, and how that plight has been allowed to persist.

“How do you want people to believe that there was such a thing as Roma slavery when they’ve never heard of it? When they’ve never even seen it in a book?”

“The topic of the film is not the past nor the present but the connection between them,” Radu Jude tells me when I meet him in a London hotel. An imposing yet soft-spoken and restless figure, Jude talks with the thoughtfulness that his subject matter requires. “I was interested in dealing with a story that happens in the past but is relevant for today’s Romania.” Roma slavery certainly fits this brief, although Jude admits that he arrived at the topic by chance. “I started elsewhere, but little by little this story became more important,” he says. “The first impulse was not to make a film about slavery, which was something I didn’t know much about.”

In this he is not alone. Aferim! is not only the first feature film to tackle the issue of Roma slavery: Jude is speaking into a near-total cultural vacuum. I speak to Claudiu Stanescu, a Roma activist based in Bucharest, to gain more of an insight into the issues that the film raises. He tells me that many Romanians refuse to accept that Roma slavery ever even occurred, such is the paucity of public discussion. “We’ve never had a movie about this until now, we’ve never even had a documentary. We don’t have it in history books in schools,” he says. “How do you want people to believe that there was such a thing as Roma slavery when they’ve never heard of it? When they’ve never even seen it in a book?” This historical ignorance feeds directly into the crisis of today’s Roma communities. To a degree that is rarely appreciated in the west, the Roma of east Europe are subject to institutionalised discrimination: in education, health, housing and media representation.