Our School Wins Best International Feature at HRAFF in Australia!

Wonderful news today - Our School has been awarded Best International Feature at the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival in Australia! We are honored to have been selected from a stellar line-up, and to have been so warmly received by the jury and by public of the festival! We are also grateful for having had the chance to screen in multiple cities on the continent: Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. We'd be hard pressed to find places more remote from Târgu Lăpuș, where Alin, Beni, and Dana live, so it's particularly thrilling to know that the story of these three children resonated for the audiences of the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival.

Our School Receives Graine de Cinéphage Award in Créteil

On April 8, International Roma Day, we had an additional reason to celebrate:  Our School received the Graine de Cinéphage award at Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil. The award is given by the youth jury of the venerable festival, and has additional, hopeful meaning given the recent history of Romanian Roma in France. We are honored and grateful - to the youth jury, the festival itself, and the our wonderful partners at Amnesty International France, who co-hosted our screenings there. We cannot wait to share with Alin, Beni and Dana the news that their story is valued by young film lovers!

Our School Nominated for the Romanian Gopo Awards!

The Gopo Award statue. Image: Premiile Gopo

Wonderful news: This morning we were nominated in the Best Documentary category of Romanian Gopo Awards (Premiile Gopo)! It's fantastic to see Alin, Beni and Dana's story included among the best Romanian films of last year. We are honored and moved to be nominated, and thrilled to be in the company of such wonderful Romanian documentaries as Radu Muntean's Visiting Hours.

The Gopos were set up in 2006 to reward the best Romanian film productions of each year - of which there is quite a bit these days: Past winners include 12:08 East of Bucharest, Palme d'Or Winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Emmy-winner The World According to Ion B, and the fantastic Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu. 

The Gopos were named after Romanian animation artist and Palme d'Or winner Ion Popescu Gopo, whose iconic character serves as the award statue. He's sort of an inverted Oscar: Equally bold and naked and shiny, he's a lot less muscular or broad-shouldered, sporting instead a pot belly to balance his large, puzzled head.

The awards ceremony will be held in Bucharest in late March.

Our School Nominated for a Silver Eye Award

The Silver Eye Award for Best European Documentary Film, established in 2009. Image: IDF

We are very honored that Our School was nominated for a Silver Eye Award for the best feature-length East European documentary film to come out in 2011. The award winners, selected by an international jury of industry professionals, will be announced during the closing ceremony of the 15th Jihlava International Documentary Festival on October 29th. We're looking forward to coming back to Jihlava - that's were we first pitched the film project, back in 2006. And this is as good a time as ever to thank the lovely people at the Institute of Documentary Film, who have been supporting Our School in ways big and small for the past five years!

Grand Jury Prize for Our School at Silverdocs!

Photo credit: Mona Nicoara (c) Sat Mic Film, LLC

We won the Sterling Award for Best US Feature at the Silverdocs festival today! It is a tremendous honor to receive the grand jury prize at such a prestigious festival - and we intend to leverage the life out of it! Thank you to Silverdocs for embracing our film, and to Silver Spring audiences for their warm,  enthusiastic response!

This is the motivation of the jury:

The cinematic quality of this film, the filmmaker's vision and the power of the story's core issue impressed the jury, revealing an intimate depiction of a marginalized and underrepresented community whose voice is seldom heard. 

The filmmaker brings to light a timely human rights issue with compassion and intimacy. With a unique point of view, we are given access to a legacy of discrimination and disenfranchisement that oppresses a community.

The film captures the mundane, humorous and joyous aspects of life, as well as practices that are harrowing and powerful and leave an undeniably memorable imprint on the viewer.

We were vaguely more articulate in the ceremony itself, but it basically boils down to this: Wow.

Our School's Editor Is the First Karen Schmeer Fellow!

Editor Erin Casper. Photo credit: Tanya Braganti

Our wonderful editor, Erin Casper, was awarded the inaugural Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship, named after the late, extraordinarily talended Karen Schmeer, who edited fantastic documentaries such as The Fog of War, Sketches of Frank Gehry, Sergio and Bobby Fisher Against the World before her premature death early last year. The press announcement says:

Erin Casper is a rising talent in the documentary editing world. Having worked as an assistant and associate editor on a variety of documentary films including Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love, Erin recently completed her first feature as lead editor, Our School, a verité documentary directed by Mona Nicoara about school segregation of the Roma (‘Gypsy’) children in Romania. “Erin has been a joyful and formidable collaborator,” says Nicoara. “I have learned to fully trust her instincts and to listen very carefully when she stands her ground on issues of emotional structure and stylistic choices. The film fully reflects her quirky sensibility, emotional intelligence, and profound understanding of documentary ethics.”

Nearly 100 applications were received for the initial year of the fellowship from a diverse and talented group of editors across the country. Ms. Casper impressed the fellowship committee with her dedication, love of editing, humility, humor, curiosity and remarkable ability to shape a story as demonstrated in Our School.

We're thrilled for Erin! Her tremendous talent deserves all the recognition in the world. We're just glad the world took notice of what we've known all along.