Transnistria was still part of the Soviet Union when German and Romanian troops invaded in 1941. Along with many Jewish deportees, some 25,000 Roma were transported there from Romania. The prisoners were interred in appalling conditions, for the most part lacking food and winter clothing. It was a massacre perpetrated in slow motion: half of the deportees starved or froze to death if not killed by typhoid or acts of arbitrary violence first. Something of the unimaginable scale of this atrocity is conveyed by VALEA PLÂNGERII / VALLEY OF SIGHS, a documentary that is cautious and tenacious in equal measure. It shows interviews with survivors (who were children at the time) and eye-witnesses from surrounding villages, unearths military and police documents that plot the “progress” of the on-going genocide, juxtaposes this material with images of idyllic countryside in which the horrors of the past are barely conceivable. The result is a multi-layered filmic monument to the victims of a little-known chapter of the holocaust – and one that continues, in Romania, to be a taboo subject.