Obiter sat in rapt silence while a young Roma man, for reasons unexplained, wrestled with a German shepherd dog before throwing himself off a cliff into the roiling waters below. Obiter was at the Strasbourg launch of the exquisitely named Fanny Ardant’s six-minute film Chimères Absentes (Departed Dreams). The French actress and film producer made the film to support the Council of Europe’s campaign to protect the continent’s 12 million Roma people from discrimination. The, story, filmed in Italy, is of a Roma child excluded from school lunches because her family cannot afford to pay for them. The moral of the tale, it seemed, is that the Roma are in touch with a mystical reality that the settled community is too materialistic and crass to perceive. Not everybody in the audience sympathised. A Romanian journalist ventured that the Roma have ‘problems with the law’ and do not pay taxes. Obiter sat in chastened silence as Ardant accused the law of ‘crushing’ the distinctiveness of different cultures. Read about the campaign at the Council of Europe’s website.