Slovak Roma Sterilization Film Criticized as Bloodless
SkimNews Take
The film's aesthetic distance becomes the mechanism of its own failure — filtering coerced sterilization through a white doctor's moral awakening replicates the institutional removal of Roma voice the review itself identifies.
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- Ivan Ostrochovský's "Only Beautiful Things to Look At" is set in 1980s Czechoslovakia during the state's racist program of coercing sterilization on Roma women, with the policy continuing well into the 21st century in both the Czech and Slovak Republics.
- The film's protagonist Ingrid (Anna Geislerová) is a white female hospital doctor who performs sterilizations and eventually undergoes a moral awakening — but the Roma women shown in an opening montage are framed and lit with dignity yet never speak.
- Simona Boledovičová plays Agata, a Roma orderly, and Eva Mores plays her estranged sister Jula; the reviewer calls their storyline of reconciling with Roma identity "the more intriguing narrative strand," but says the film insistently returns focus to Ingrid.
- The sterilization procedure left patients with a small scar beneath the navel nicknamed "the bow," and hospitals faced government-recommended quotas for the operations, per the review.
- The reviewer critiques the film's visual approach — Ingrid's "fairytale princess" countryside home, warm-lit evenings, macro close-ups emphasizing her blondeness — for placing "the real plight of the Roma several removes of perspective and aesthetic manipulation away."
- The review concludes that the film falls short of a "white savior narrative" in crude terms but still "assumes the best conduit for a wide audience to understand the cruelty visited on Czechoslovakian Roma families, is the moral awakening of a white woman."
Why it matters: The film tackles a documented human-rights atrocity — the coerced sterilization of Roma women, a policy that lasted into the 2000s in the Czech and Slovak Republics — but by filtering it through a white protagonist and a 'period drama' aesthetic, it risks letting audiences treat a modern atrocity as distant history, a reminder that framing choices in atrocity cinema determine which victims are heard.
