Pepi Fandango

A Holocaust survivor searches for healing through flamenco, friendship, and memory

Pepi Fandango follows Peter Perez, known as Pepi, a Viennese Holocaust survivor in his mid eighties, and his lifelong friend Alfred, a guitarist, as they embark on a road trip from Austria to southern Spain. Armed with sharp Viennese humour and a guitar in the trunk, the two friends travel across Europe in search of the roots of flamenco, and of a song Pepi has been unable to write for most of his life.

As a child, Pepi was imprisoned with his family in the Rivesaltes concentration camp in southern France after fleeing Nazi persecution. There, he was separated from his parents and placed among refugee children from the Spanish Civil War, including Spanish Roma. Through the camp’s walls, Pepi listened to Roma children and adults singing fandangos to communicate with their families. Those voices, filled with hunger, sorrow, and longing, became etched into his memory, marking the beginning of a lifelong, unspoken trauma.

Decades later, Pepi hopes to finally compose his own fandango, a way of giving voice to what he has never been able to articulate. The journey leads him back to Paterna de Rivera, a small Andalusian village he has visited for years, drawn by its flamenco tradition and its annual fiesta. Yet the music continues to resist him, mirroring his inability to accept what happened.

Ultimately, Pepi must return to Rivesaltes for the first time since childhood. Confronting the present day landscape of the camp forces memory and reality to collide. Through friendship, music, and movement, Pepi Fandango explores trauma, survival, and the fragile power of art to carry pain while offering the possibility of release.