Our School Screens in the European Parliament!

On April 11, 2013, Our School finally screened in the European Parliament. It's been a long time coming. This was one of our goals with this film from the very beginning, even before we shot the first minute for it. And thanks to Member of the European Parliament Monica Macovei and her wonderful staff, we were able to finally make it happen during a week-long series of actions centered on the International Roma Day (April 8) in Brussels. 

Monica Macovei has been a long-time advocate for human rights. Director Mona Nicoara first met her in the early 1990s, when they were both working with the Romanian Helsinki Committee. Over the years, Monica Macovei has shown an unwavering commitment to human rights and rule of law principles, even as she entered into politics, first as Minister of Justice in Romania and now as an elected member of the European Parliament. 

We are so grateful for this opportunity to show the film before members of the European Parliament, their staffers, and other decision-makers in the European Union. This is a crucial year for Roma integration in Europe, as the European Commission and its member states finalize and begin to implement continent-wide integration policies. We were thrilled to see a full house turn up for the screening - including activists and journalists who made the trip to the Parliament building for the specific purpose of attending the screening and meeting European representatives and their staffers. We were also pleased to see the Roma interns at the European Commission come to support the film - as they always did over the past two years. The questions after the screening showed a keen interest in the key challenges to integration: project implementation at the local level,

Expanded Romania Release: Tour, DVD & Online Streaming

Image courtesy of Centrul Ceh & One World Romania

We are thrilled to announce that, following our tour of Romanian cities this spring, Our School is expanding to additional cities in Romania this fall, with our partners at One World Romania On Tour. We'll be screening in the following new cities: 

• Brasov on Wed, Oct 31 8pm at Centrul Cultural Reduta
• Galati on Sat, Nov 3 5:30pm at Muzeul de Arta Vizuala
• Targu Mures on Fri, Nov 9 4pm at Palatul Culturii
• Sighetu Marmatiei on Fri, Nov 9 8pm at Sala Radio Sighet
• Resita on Wed, Nov 14 5pm at Colegiul T.Lalescu
• Miercurea Ciuc on Thurs, Nov 15 8pm at Muzeul Secuiesc
• Sfantu Gheorghe on Sat, Nov 17 7pm at Sala Ecou 

Our School will be launched on DVD in November as part of a wonderful first collection of documentary DVDs put out by our partners at One World Romania. The DVDs will be launched in Bucharest on November 22 at Libraria Bastilia and November 26 at Centrul Ceh. Meanwhile, they can be pre-ordered at a 20% discount here.

Finally, Our School will later become available for streaming in Romania on the WebKino platform launched by our distributor, Cristian Mungiu's Voodoo Films. We will update the launch date and post the text code for accessing the film as soon as they become available.

Our School Broadens Swiss Release

Our School poster at Bio Carouge in Geneva. Photo (c) Miruna Coca-Cozma

Following an eight-week theatrical release in Swiss Romande this spring, Our School expands its run to new cinemas, as well as to the German-speaking Swiss territories this fall. 

We have reached out to Swiss teachers' groups, human rights organizations and authorities to make the best use of the film as a springboard for a broader discussion about Roma integration and the pressing issue of overcoming prejudice in Switzerland, where Roma migrants often face backlash. 

Here is a partial list of Swiss screenings lined up for this fall:

• Haute école pédagogique Vaud in Lausanne shows excerpts of the film on Sun, Sept 22 at 2pm at UNIL, Dorigny, as part of the Assises romandes de l'éducation, which focus this year on school integration; a full screening follows in the evening, with a discussion conducted by Miruna Coca-Cozma 
• Our School is this year's opening film for the CinéBrunch Regards d'Ailleurs series in Fribourg on Sat, Oct 13 at 11am at Cinemotion Rex; Q&A with Director Miruna Coca-Cozma follows the screening
• Centre de Culture ABC in La-Chaux-de-Fonds will follow a screening on Tue, Oct 23 at 5:30pm  with a round table on Roma integration with the participation of Amnesty International Switzerland, the President of the Neuchâtel State Council and the Head of the Department of Education, representatives of the Lausanne Police, and director Miruna Coca-Cozma; Our School will also screen at ABC on Sat, Oct 27 and Sun, Oct 28 at  4pm
• Cinéma de Cossonay shows Our School on Wed, Oct 24 at 8:30pm, again with a Q&A with Director Miruna Coca-Cozma
• The wonderful arthouse cinema Kino Kunstmuseum in Berne will show Our School on Fri, Nov 2 at 6:30pm, Sat, Nov 3 at 6pm (followed by Q&A with Director Miruna Coca-Cozma), Sun, Nov 4 at 4:30pm (also followed by Q&A with Director Miruna Coca-Cozma), as well as Wed, Nov 7 at 6:30pm
• Cinéma Rex in Aubonne will screen Our School on Mon, Nov 12 at 8:30pm 
• Finally, we're returning to the Carouge Cinéma Bio 72 in Geneva, where the film ran for seven consecutive weeks this spring, for an educational screening with Director Miruna Coca-Cozma on Tues, Nov 13, at 11am
  

If you cannot catch Miruna Coca-Cozma doing a Q&A this fall, you can take a look at her interviews in Les Quotidiennes - Miruna Coca-Cozma filme le reve entrave d'une école pour enfants Roms - or listen to the hour-long radio show featuring her on Radio RTS - Un documentaire sur les enfants roms.

Guardian Op-Ed by Mona Nicoara on "Gypsy" Reality Shows

[This op-ed by Our School Director Mona Nicoara was originally published on July 28, 2012, by the The Guardian as American Gypsies Needs to Catch up with the Reality of Roma People's Lives in the Comment is Free section of the US online edition. Thank you to Jessica Reed and Gary Younge for supporting the publication of the piece.]

Reality shows feed on stereotypes and disdain for tribes other than one's own. Most people in the US know of Jersey Shore, which generated a debate around the representation of Italian-Americans on television. There are many more like it: The Littlest Groom (which plays on stereotypes about little people), My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé (overweight people) and, yes, the unfortunately and descriptively titled Black Mafia Family Wives.

Now comes National Geographic's new reality series, American Gypsies, launched on the heels of TLC's ongoing My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding, itself a spin-off of the UK's Channel 4's enormously successful Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. Sadly, this spate of exoticising voyeurism has nothing to do with genuine interest in Roma or Travellers, the two ethnic groups lumped together under the term "Gypsy" (a term considered derogatory by most Roma activists). Rather, it has everything to do with the chase for ratings, which is at the heart of the tabloidisation of television everywhere. Consequently, these shows are built on tried and true tropes: broad stereotypes, artificially constructed conflicts, unidimensional characters, set-up scenes and scripted lines.

Accuracy is beside the point: these shows are invested in reproducing a version of what it means to be a "Gypsy" that broadcasters believe to be most comfortable for their audience – Esmeralda-like headscarves, belly dancing, innate violence, gaudy parties, psychic healing parlours. The teaser for the series manages to cram all of those cliches into one minute, with time to spare. The response has been predictable: within a day, online comments were rife with racial slurs and no small number of sympathetic references to Hitler.

I have seen this dynamic before. I grew up in an atmosphere permeated by the kind of stereotypes about violent, dirty and scheming "Gypsies" that abound in Europe. I am ethnically Romanian and grew up in Romania, where Roma were enslaved until the 1860s and deported to extermination camps during the second world war. The few who remained nomadic were forcibly settled during communism. Then, many were chased out of villages during violent, deadly pogroms in the 1990s. To this day, Roma children are shunted into dead-end segregated schools which trap them in the vicious cycle of poverty and disenfranchisement.

Yet Roma continue to be blamed for living at the edge of society. Reality shows perpetuate this fiction of self-segregation by stressing difference and tradition, by recasting the viewers' ignorance as secrecy on the part of the Roma and by artificially presenting the preservation of ethnic identity as radically opposed to those elements that make up our common humanity: curiosity and learning, making new friends, falling in love. American Gypsies begins by pronouncing: "For over 1,000 years, Romany or Gypsy people have remained hidden from view. Until now" then proceeds to repeatedly flash info-cards on the fear of outsiders and the mating habits of Roma in their natural habitat. Fittingly, the tagline for this new show is "You Don't Know Gypsy." In the UK, the last season of Channel 4's Big Fat Gypsy Weddings was announced by billboards touting it as "Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier." Try that out with other minorities. Really, see how it feels.

These shows are especially harmful because Roma people do not have any alternative representations in the public's imagination. There is no Roma equivalent to Leonardo da Vinci or Joe DiMaggio, to Rosa Parks or Barack Obama. In the US, where there is very little awareness of Roma, My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding and American Gypsies will likely turn ignorance into all-out prejudice. In the UK, Big Fat Gypsy Weddings has already led to a spike in bullying of Roma and Traveller children. Elsewhere in eastern Europe, where it has been syndicated, the franchise will only fan the flames of violent racism by playing into the hands of skinheads and nationalists.

I know there are other, much more rewarding ways to treat the subject for a general audience. In 2006, I took a small crew to a tiny town in Transylvania to follow a group of Roma children who were taken out of a crumbling segregated school into a Romanian-led school, where they faced further rejection and humiliation. Over the course of five years, we worked with the conviction that audiences would be interested in connecting to the day-to-day lives of Roma and exploring the complexity of race relations. It paid off: in the 30 countries where we screened over the past year, sold-out rooms engaged with our film in lively discussions that sometimes stretched for hours. We found mainstream audiences thrilled to be thinking for themselves, open to exploring their own contribution to inequality, and moved by our shared humanity.

We should give ourselves more credit: we have shown that we can break through patterns of oppression several times over the course of history. Little by little, the way we treat and understand Roma will change, inexorably for the better. It is a shame that television will have to catch up to this, instead of leading the way.

Our School on Tour in Romania

We're finally coming to a broad audience in eight cities in Romania! Over the next month, Our School will be touring Romania with Zilele Filmului Românesc, a caravan of the best Romanian documentaries organized by Voodoo Films, the distribution company started by Romanian Palme d'Or-winning director Cristian Mungiu to bring Romanian films to under-served regions of the country. 

Our School be screening in Ploieşti, Botoşani, Râmnicu Vâlcea, Piteşti, Baia Mare, and Bucharest between May 23 and June 29, alongside two other beautiful Romanian films: Dieter Auner's Off the Beaten Track and Anca Damian's Crulic. You can find a complete schedule of screenings here. 

Additionally, we'll have several screenings in Cluj through EducaTIFF, the film education program of the Transylvania International Film Festival, before and during the festival itself. More details coming up here. 

And we will screen in Timișoara, also in early June, through the traveling events of the Astra Film Festival.

Last, but not least, we will be back in Bucharest on June 10, in a special screening at fabulous International Romani Art Festival!

We will update all screening times and locations under the UPCOMING SCREENINGS on the right of this blog post, as the details become public.

We Need Your Input: Our School Coming to US Educators

Our School is part of Reel Education, a collective of nine documentary film projects that provide a nuanced and compelling portrait of education. Using powerful personal stories, and highlighting themes that range from closing achievement gaps to the protection of funding for after-school programs, each of these films has the power to influence a small corner of the national conversation on education and to engage people in action. But pooled together and positioned into the work of organizations and other leaders who share their collective vision, the impact of our media can be amplified.

We are collaborating with Working Films to identify communities across the country that could benefit from using the Reel Education films in their advocacy, training, or organizing efforts. We want to know which of these project are most closely aligned with the issues at play in your community and how film screenings could advance your work. So please take a few moments to check out the trailers for all of the amazing film projects and then answer this short survey.

We need your input! Have more questions about Reel Education? Feel free to contact Anna Lee at Working Films. She’s heading up the project.

  

A Special Screening with the Romanian Ministry of Education

Post-screening Q&A - from left to right: Mircea Toma of Active Watch, Director Mona Nicoara, Minister of Education Catalin Baba, Director of Photography Ovidiu Marginean, Magda Matache of Romani CRISS, and Costel Bercus of Roma Education Fund. Photo by Catalin Georgescu for One World Romania

[This blogpost by Mona Nicoara appeared originally as the inaugural post in the Dispatches from the Field series on the Chicken and Egg Pictures blog. We are grateful to Chicken and Egg for their continuing creative, moral and financial support of Our School over the past three years.] 

In March 2012, the Romanian Minister of Education made a loud, public commitment to include Our School into national teacher training curricula at all levels.  This had been the intention all along, since starting out development work on the film back in 2005: To get Our School  into the education systems of those countries where the issue of racial segregation of Roma in school was the most pressing. But the long way here has been neither straight nor obvious.

I came to the project as a human rights activist who had done extensive work on Roma rights. I knew the issue, knew pretty much everyone working on it — and had their support. I really thought that we’d be pretty much snap our fingers when the film was finished — and all the NGOs working on Roma education would rush to snatch the film from our hands and screen it for decision-makers all over Europe.

To be fair, some of that happened, right away: The London Secretariat of Amnesty International came on board after seeing a fine cut of the film, and have remained faithful partners for more than a year, encouraging their country groups to co-present some of our national premieres, organizing panels and Q&As, and taking the film over after our festival premieres for community screenings in places like Denmark, Greece or France. Works like a dream.

But we had some early wake-up calls, too: Our world premiere, scheduled simultaneously with a long-overdue review of the Czech Republic and Greece’s compliance with European Court of Human Rights judgments on school segregation, fell short of expectations. The Prague festival where we premiered was run by an organization that had just left an NGO coalition for desegregation in the Czech Republic — so it became clear, very quickly, that they were not going to promote the film. The local NGOs were busy waging war on the recent appointment of right-wing extremists in the Ministry of Education. Bringing decision-makers into a screening room was out of the question. And then there was the Czech press, which turned out to be more excited about films they had heard about from other festivals coming to Prague than about a world premiere which was, in their view, untested. (Lest this sound like a total failure, let me add this: The audience was just fantastic — warm, engaged and supportive.)

We learned two lessons: First, we needed to concentrate on making Our School a success as a film before it could be taken seriously as a tool. In the countries where we want to work most, there is no established culture of using documentaries as tools for change. For people to even begin to consider the social value of the film, we needed to first command as much of an artistic spotlight as we could. And, second, we needed to time events not so much around obvious advocacy opportunities as around the needs of our partner organizations. If that means waiting, so be it.

It helped that we had fantastic opportunities to position the film artistically right off the bat: A high-profile North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival; our fantastic Romanian premiere at the prestigious Transylvania International Film Festival; a grand jury prize for Best US Documentary at Silverdocs and nominations for the Silver Eye for Best Eastern European Documentary and a Gopo Award for Best Romanian Documentary; over 40 festivals during the first year alone; and some darn good press.

Some time towards the end of our first year out in the world, the invitations we had been seeking all along started coming in — from the various intergovernmental organizations which form the alphabet soup ruling Europe, from major funders and donor agencies, and from local partners who had very clear ideas of how Our School could be of use to them. It’s not always easy to work around our partners’ schedules to coordinate these actions with our continuing festival run (and try to get as much bang from our travel bucks as possible) — but, somehow, by hook or by crook, we’ve been able to make it work each time we needed to.

The screening we had in March in Bucharest is a very good example of that. The film had been in various festivals in Romania for nine months, gathering interest and momentum. As we were trying to figure out the best timing for an advocacy screening in Bucharest, an invitation to take part in the One World Romania festival arrived. We knew right away that this was a good fit: This is an strong, intelligently programmed and socially engaged festival (the proportion of consequential Chicken and Egg and Sundance Documentary Fund-supported projects selected each year would be downright funny if it  didn’t make perfect sense). They had a history of organizing high-profile public debates around  documentary films — and they were willing to do the same for Our School.

We a few loyal partners on the ground, starting with Romani CRISS, the most prominent Roma NGO in Romania, who had also helped us jump-start the project and served as our fiscal sponsor during production; and the Roma Education Fund, one of our earliest funders, whose leadership had already been co-hosting screenings of Our School in the US Congress, at the opening of the Verzio festival in Budapest, and before a crowd of pro bono lawyers and Roma rights activists in Berlin. However, while these NGOs were strong on substance and more than happy to help, neither of them had the experience or staff capacity to organize a high-profile advocacy event around a documentary film. That task fell to ActiveWatch, a media-monitoring agency who had the substance, experience, capacity, and convening power to pull off such an event. Most importantly, they had Teo, a whip-smart and devastatingly organized staff member with whom, over the couple of months leading up to the event, I ended up talking probably more than I got to talk to my own family. That’s really what it takes to make these things happen.

It was all going according to plan until the Minister of Education changed, unexpectedly,  one month before our screening. I knew the previous Minister (we had grown up in the same town and our parents knew each other). He was aware of the film. I knew he has interested in Roma education issues. The new Minister, however, was a total mystery. But he reacted very openly when approached, and promised to come to the screening. We kept our fingers crossed that the screening would actually stay on his schedule, and even managed to get a brief meeting with him the day before to confirm his presence, and make sure he understands the set-up of the event. Other officials, however, were less responsive: The President’s Office, the relevant Parliament committees, the Members of the European Parliament representing Romania did not send anyone to the screening, and it wasn’t for lack of trying on our (actually mostly Teo’s) part.

When screening time came around, we had an incredible energy in the room - the anticipation and support in Bucharest had been growing for almost one year, and it paid off big time for us. The 350-seat room was packed to the gills, with people jockeying for standing room. During the debate following the film, the Ministry committed to making Our School part of the teacher training curricula by the start of the new school year. The National Council for Combating Discrimination asked for DVDs that they could start using in training programs the following week. And the Pedagogical Sciences program at the Bucharest University asked for a screening in two days. It’s hard to even imagine a stronger commitment from government agencies and relevant authorities - but it all came about in large part because we waited for the right opportunity and had the right partners on board.

We were lucky in other ways too: The next week we were able to present our campaigning goals in the Good Pitch2 organized during the Movies That Matter festival in the Hague. The timing could not have been better, coming off the success of our Romanian efforts. We were able to garner interest from new funders who offered to supplement the audience engagement and advocacy grants we received from the Sundance Documentary Fund and the Open Society Institute. One of our earliest funders in Romania, UNICEF, offered to take the film on at a regional level.

Finally, we received an invitation to do what we had been hoping to be able to do with this film since 2005: screen it before European Union officials in Brussels. That’s coming up in May, together with an effort to replicate our work in Romania in Hungary, and, hopefully, as more grants come in, to other places where school segregation of Roma is a burning issue: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia, but also Italy and France.

It is exciting, but also daunting: There is an awful lot of countries where we need to do this kind of work. We have already been on the road with the film for over a year, yet  we’re looking down the barrel of at least another year of this kind of work — and that’s after working six years to make the darn film. Thankfully, it’s worth it. And that’s what has been keeping us going all along, from the very beginning.

A Romanian public television show,  Rom European, dedicated to Our School's special screening in Bucharest may give you a flavor of the event: 

Cold Cannot Stop Us: Our Most Memorable Screening in France

Audience marching between screening locations in the freezing cold. Photo courtesy of Cousou Main (c) Sandrine Balade

Last night we had an epic screening in the Festival Étoiles Francophones, in the words of Miruna Coca-Cozma: The boiler in the Magic Cinéma de Bobigny broke on account of the freezing temperatures, and the entire audience dutifully marched to a nearby library. 

Everyone stayed for the screening and the Q&A, despite the cold and the unusual logistics. We had an animated after-screening debate with Julie Biro from CCFD-Terre Solidaire, Director Miruna Coca-Cozma, and Philippe Goossens from Amnesty International France - and a fully defrosted audience. We were especially honored by the presence and participation of teachers working with Roma children (from Romania and elsewhere) in integrated schools in Bobigny. 

We clearly have an audience that's not only devoted, but very disciplined and patient. Grand merci! And thank you to the organizers of the festival, Cousu Main, for making this possible against the odds, to the Elsa Triolet Library for their last-minute hospitality, and to our partners at Amnesty International for being there for us, as always. 

This is by no means our last screening in France - but it will certainly be the most memorable!

After-screening discussion. Photo courtesy of Cousou Main (c) Sandrine Balade

Our School is the Opening Film of the Verzio Festival in Budapest

We are thrilled to announce that Our School will be opening the 8th Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Festival in Budapest, Hungary. It's not just a fantastic honor, but also a homecoming of sorts: Some of us used to live in Budapest while shooting the film, have many friends in the Roma rights movement there, and attended every edition of Verzio while we were there. The line-up was always outstanding.

The opening night screening will take place on November 8 - on the same day as the “National Roma Integration Strategies: Ensuring a Comprehensive and Effective European Approach” takes place in the European Parliament in Brussels as part of a process for developing EU-wide Roma integration policies. The 7 pm screening at the Toldi cinema in Budapest will be followed by a discussion moderated by the Chair of the Roma Education Fund. We will have a second screening there on Friday, November 11, at 6 pm, followed by a panel with Budapest-based Roma rights activists. 

We are very much looking forward to this! 

Our School Screening in the US Congress

Two short days after winning the Sterling Award for Best US Feature at the Silverdocs film festival, in Silver Spring, MD, we had to come back to the Washington, DC, area for a screening of Our School in the United States Congress. It is hard to imagine a much greater honor, or a bigger chance to present to American policymakers the Europe-wide issue of segregated education for Roma children. 

The US Helsinki Commission, which has a long record of addressing Roma issues, graciously hosted the screening. Producer-Director Mona Nicoara joined Chair of the Roma Education Fund Costel Bercus and Mr Serban Brebenel of the Romanian Embassy in a long discussion, an hour-long fragment of which you can see in the YouTube clip embedded above. Do not be fooled by the static camera - this was an engaging discussion, which included representatives of the State Department, USAID, US Congress staffers, Roma activists, as well a organizations with a long track record of working on Roma issues in Europe. 

An understanding emerged that folks working on education, human rights, as well as disability right need to better coordinate their efforts on the issue, and that Roma rights, and education in particular, need to become a priority for US foreign policy makers. 

For Our School, this was the first, but by no means the last, such advocacy screening. We are planning similar events at the State Department in the US, the European Parliament, and before national decision-makers in select European countries. 

[We are tremendously grateful to Ms Erika Schlager of the US Helsinki Commission for making this event possible.]

Our School's Premiere in Romania: Reflections

Standing ovation at the Transylvania International Film Festival. Photo credit Mona Nicoara (c) Sat Mic Film, LLC

[This blog post was originally published on the Working Films blog. Our School is part of the Working Films Reel Education collaborative, an initiative bringing together filmmakers working on education with stakeholders and activists in the field.]

After starting in festivals in Europe and the US, Our School finally had its premiere in Romania - a homecoming of sorts for the film, and an event that we have been bracing for almost six years now.

We had shot the film in the small town in Transylvania, a very real place in Northern Romania. Our intention was to begin to understand and hopefully improve race relations between majority Romanians and the Roma ethnic minority by showing under a magnifying glass the story of three spirited Roma children involved in a school integration project in the small town of Targu Lapus. What we ended up with, after four years of production and two years of editing, is a paradigmatic story of hope, squandered opportunities, and infuriating cultural and institutional inertia.

And racism. Quite a bit of racism, some intentional, most merely reflexive, yet all of it profoundly familiar to all Romanians (ourselves, the filmmakers, included). Which is precisely why we were bracing so hard, and for so long, for the Romanian premiere. We knew that in Romania, even more than in other places in Europe or the US, Our School would be holding a mirror up to its audience - an unflattering one, at that. And there are few things as counter-productive and virulent as unexamined, defensive racism.

We did what we could to prepare for the premiere - in terms of press, NGO partners on the ground, and the participants themselves. The NGO partners were as nervous as we were about the premiere, and were additionally chomping at the bit to use the film for their own purposes. The participants got to see the film, on their own terms, before the festival premiere, on the principle that it is cruel and unusual treatment to see your own story projected on a very large screen, with a large audience, before having had the time to absorb it, privately. The kids had also never been to the cinema before, so they were extra nervous on that account. Our youngest participant, Alin, helped to lighten the mood by eating three ice-creams in rapid succession and contently throwing up right before the screening.

The advance press was luke-warm - understandably, since they had not seen the film, and the international success of the new Romanian cinema over past ten years has made  them unimpressed with projects with the kind of international festival success that Our School had. The online comments to the advance press coverage were an entirely different matter: Coming exclusively from people who had not seen the film but were assuming that no film on Roma would ever help , they contained violent threats and personal attacks against the filmmaking team for “destroying Romania’s image abroad.” We assumed they came from people who had too much time on their hands, but we were also put on notice: Our School had the potential of generating a strong backlash, and that was the last thing we wanted to happen.

Matters were not helped much by the fact that the great folk at the Transylvania International Film Festival programmed us in the largest cinema they had: 750 seats. We worried that the seats would remain empty, then we worried that they would be filled with people who do not like what they seen on the screen.

Basically, we worried about everything.

Whatever worries we had were dispersed in the first five minutes of the screening. The huge audience laughed loudly at even the smallest, almost private, jokes in the film. They started clapping after particularly poignant lines, making the projectionist worried that they would not hear the soundtrack. They started sniffling, visibly moved towards the end. And, when the credits ended and we all lined up on the stage, we found them giving the children a standing ovation. For five whole minutes.

Alin turned to us and whispered: “Are all of these guys Romanian?” Yes, they were. And they were applauding the courage, resilience, spirit and sass of Alin, Dana, Beni - and of the Romanian friends they managed to make, despite all odds, along the way. The audience had connected to the kids, had managed to see themselves in our film, without defensiveness or rancor, and had found ways to process and understand what they could change in themselves by the time the credits stopped rolling.

A teacher confessed to treating her Roma students as inferior - I wanted to put her in touch with the New York teacher who confessed during our Q&A at the Tribeca Film Festival that she had been tracking immigrant children in special education programs because she herself lacked support and know-how to integrate them. A local mentioned a case of segregation next door to the screening venue - an activist invited the audience to investigate the case, right then and there. A journalist mused about what the Ministry of Education should do with the film - we referred him to the principal in Our School, who despite an awareness that the film showed him in a light that was “a little too true” (his words), ended up generously saying that it is an extraordinary tool that should be used to train and inform people not only in Romania, but abroad.

There were also hugs - lots of them. Alin, Beni, and Dana said that they were treated, for that one night, better than they had been treated, cumulatively, their entire life.

The press reaction that came after was no less enthusiastic. A journalist confessed to an allergy to issue films and declared herself not only surprised, but cured. An editorial talked about how Our School is not only a film about Roma, it is a film about ourselves. A reputed blog said the audience had come in with fixed ideas and had come out with the urge to apologize to Roma children on behalf  of all Romanians.

We know this was an ideal audience in many ways - progressive, trained by ten years of challenging festival experience, and moved by the presence of the children in the room. But having an initial reaction like this from hundreds of people gives us hope for what this film can do. It gives us hope that the film can do the job we always intended for it: Point to a systemic problem, make us understand it in the most direct, human way, and do the hardest things of all - change hearts and minds and open up a some hope for the future

A Useful Experiment in Ireland

The "losers" of the social experiment at Guth Gafa. Photo credit: Mona Nicoara (c) Sat Mic Film, LLC

The delightful Guth Gafa International Documentary Festival in the village Gortahork in north-western Ireland devised an experiment meant to awaken in Our School's audience members a visceral understanding of what our protagonists' life looks like on a daily basis:

Before the second screening of Our School at Guth Gafa, festival staffer Paul Bonar and his drama students conducted a social experiment in discrimination which divided the audience members of into two groups: privileged guests and underprivileged ones. The division was random, based on color-coded tickets basically drawn from a hat. The privileged were greeted by name, shown first into the cinema, and given treats. The less fortunate had to wait outside and were called in as numbers, and sat in the back of the screening venue, with no treats. The venue was small, so everyone was able to see, but the point was made. It worked: The audience was quite engaged, and the Q&As went long and in-depth. Guth Gafa is a truly special festival that way.

Standing Ovation at the Transylvania Film Fest

Dana watching herself on a big screen. Photo credit: Nicu Cherchiu (c) Transylvania International Film Festival

We had a fantastic premiere at the Transylvania International Film Festival. The festival organizers put is in the largest cinema in Cluj - a daunting 750 seats. The kids - Alin, Beni and Dana - had never been in a cinema before. They ran around the huge, state-of-the-art cinema during the tech check and just owned the place, welcoming the large audience as they started to pour in.

The energy in the room was incredible: The audience laughed and clapped at almost every line, and, when the lights went up and we all went up in front of the screen, they gave a long, heartfelt standing ovation to the kids and the filmmaking team. Alin turned to us during the standing ovation and incredulously asked: "Are all these guys Romanian?"

Dana confidently started the Q&A by thanking the audience for coming and saying: "I'm very happy for you that you liked the film." Beni's father thanked the audience for looking at the kids' story without the filters of stereotype and pre-concieved notions, with what he called "the heart's eyes."

A short amateur video put by an audience member online gives you a flavor of the event:

A gallery of great photos taken by Nicu Cherciu can be found on the TIFF site here. We'll be able to also share videos from TIFF in the near future. The support we received from the festival was incredible, and we are tremendously grateful for every single person who worked to make this premiere a success - from the great programming and promotion teams to volunteer Magda Grama and our heroic driver "Mr. Ovidiu."

Prague and Thessaloniki Premieres for Our School

A young audience in the old Olympion theater in Thessaloniki. Photo credit: Edwin Rekosh (c) Sat Mic Film, LLC

We had back-to-back premieres in the Czech Republic and Greece, synchronized with the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers Review of the implementation of European Court of Human Rights  judgments on segregated education for Roma. That's a mouthful. Let's back up a bit from the jargon here and explain: 

In the mid-1990s, Roma rights activists discovered that Roma children were routinely and in large numbers placed into inferior schools or classes, or even schools for children with intellectual disabilities. They began documenting this widespread pattern, writing reports, campaigning, and also doing something else: Building legal cases so that they could methodically and strategically attack states that permitted this practice before Europe's highest human rights court - the European Court of Human Rights based in Strasbourg, France. In 2007, their efforts bore fruit: the Court found the Czech Republic guilty of unfairly placing large numbers of Roma children in special schools intended for children with mental disabilities. Two more judgments followed, in rapid succession: One that found Greece guilty of placing Roma children in a separate facility, and one that condemned Croatia for not allowing Roma children whose Croatian was less than perfect to study in the same schools as majority children. Taken together, these three cases are, in many ways, Europe's Brown vs. Board of Education moment. 

But change on the ground is slow to come - we're hoping that our film can contribute to understanding why. Activists are extremely frustrated. The Czech Government has promised action on segregation for over three years now - but has done nothing in practice. The Greek Government hasn't even bothered to promise anything. Croatia isn't faring any better. Those governments who were not directly targeted by the Court's judgments are even less likely to find their zeal for school integration. And ethnic tensions continue to rise against the backdrop of economic crisis and renewed extremist nationalism. 

So the body that oversees the implementation of the Court's judgments on behalf of the Council of Europe is trying take a hard look at what is happening and what needs to actually happen to make school integration a reality - as is everyone else. Activist colleagues on the ground are trying new tools for making their case and raising awareness. We're hoping that Our School can be a good tool to untangle the web of cultural practices, structural barriers, and long-standing prejudice that keeps Roma children from having an equitable start in life and the same opportunities as the rest of us.

We're partnering with Amnesty International not only to launch the film on the festival circuit, but also to put it in the hands of those who want to use it. We're grateful to the One World and Thessaloniki documentary festivals for the opportunity to premiere there - and we're honored to be included in their excellent programs. This is just the beginning - but it's a very good one.

Spring Festivals Update

Springtime in Targu Lapus. Photo credit: Ovidiu Marginean (c) Sat Mic Film, LLC

We're rolling out Our School this spring - beginning with synchronized launches in the Czech Republic and Greece, two of the countries found guilty of segregating Roma children in schools at the European Court of Human Rights, and then going a national premieres in Switzerland and our North American premiere at the 10th edition of the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. Here is the schedule: 

One World Prague, March 8-17, Prague, Czech Republic

Thessaloniki Dok Fest, March 11-20, Thessaloniki, Greece

Visions du Reel, April 7-13, Nyon, Switzerland

Tribeca Film Festival, April 20-May 1, New York, USA

We're honored to be in these great festivals, and quite excited at the chance to finally present the story of Alin, Beni, and Dana before audiences in Europe and America!

Human Rights Commissioner: No Progress on Segregation in Czech Republic

As we prepare for the premiere of Our School at the One World Prague Film Festival and at Thessaloniki Doc Fest, the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, issued a report on his recent visit to the Czech Republic, highlighting segregated education as a main concern:

“Deeply-rooted anti-Gypsyism and hate crimes as well as continued segregation in education and housing are the main obstacles to inclusion that Roma face in the Czech Republic [...] Three years after a landmark judgment of the European Court of Human Rights which found that the Czech Republic had discriminated against Roma with respect to their right to education, little has changed on the ground. It is necessary to take resolute and urgent action. Tangible progress for transfers of children from special to ordinary education and overall desegregation of the school system should be made already in the next school year.”

A nuanced story about what it  truly takes to give whole generation of Roma children a real chance in life, Our School intends to contribute to the ongoing conversation on Roma education all over Europe. By telling a compelling human story that is part of a broader rights movement, Our School seeks to mobilize new energies at a moment that is ripe for change.

Reel Education Reisdency

Reel Education is an initiative of Working Films, a pioneering organization that brings together documentary films on a mission with community organizers and activism. By bringing together several film projects centered on the same theme, Reel Education took a page from the Chicken and Egg playbook for gaining traction and reaching critical mass on specific issues. Our School joined projects like Mariachi High, Shakespeare High, Brooklyn Castle, To Be Heard, Speaking in Tongues and An American Promise in a week-long residency in upstate New York aimed at developing seeding collaboration, mapping out campaign plans, and developing strategies for approaching educators and activists in the US. The little productive, fun, and snowy camp upstate was capped by a pitching session at the 52nd Street Project in New York City, where the projects were presented before a large audience of stakeholders - educators, unions, advocacy groups, teacher training institutions, etc. We're looking forward to collaborating with them, as well as with our fellow filmmakers who are part of Reel Education in the coming months and years.

Story Will Lead to Action

Chicken and Egg Pictures is an unusual funder. For starters, it gives money only to women filmmakers. The money, however, is only one small aspect of what Chicken and Egg does for their projects. There's support of all kinds that comes with the money: Professional development workshops, strategic planning residencies, introductions to potential partners, and the occasional good cooking and wine. And then there there's what they call "mentorship" - a misnomer, really, since the relationship is more collegial than professorial, and the sheer number of hours and creative energy put in by the Chicken and Egg ladies throughout the life of the project makes them more like part of the filmmaking team for each project than like mere occasional advisers. The have seen multiple cuts (including our almost 4-hour assembly, in its entirety - a heroic undertaking for which we will be forever grateful), have given us feedback on rough and fine cuts, have jumped with us in the edit room when we got stuck on the very beginning, and have been helping us figure out strategies for launch, outreach and, well, everything that has to do with the life of our film in the world.

They also do something else that's quite unusual: Instead of picking one project representing each issue, as most funders, programmers, and broadcasters do ("We already have a human rights in Belarus film" or "How many documentaries on fracking does the world need?"), they are not afraid of supporting several projects on the same issue at the same time. They believe that there is strength in numbers. And they believe that change, real impact needs a critical mass or a shift in the zeitgeist that is greater than one movie alone.

This belief that a film like Waiting for Superman should not be the end of the discussion on education (a notion that supporters of public education and charter school skeptics most probably agree with wholeheartedly), but rather the beginning of renewed interest in improving schools and striving for educational equality led them to support several films on education at the same time, including Our School. And since a Chicken and Egg grant does not come unaccompanied, we also got to partake in a host of events meant to support education film projects.

This is how we came to find ourselves in a strategy session organized by Chicken and Egg at the 92nd St Y in Tribeca, in New York City, together with film projects such as Mariachi High, Brooklyn Castle and Speaking in Tongues, as well as several powerful ladies involved in education projects in New York:  Carol Ochs of the 52nd St Project, Angela Jackson, founder of The Global Language Project and Maya Wiley, founder of the Center for Social Inclusion. A full report on the event can be found on the Chicken and Egg blog, but here is our one major takeaway from the event:

Our School can be of great use to US audiences: It can serve as a distant lens to bring problems here in the US into sharper focus; the distant setting can help peel off layers of defensiveness. In the outreach stage, we should start by focusing on communities such as Charlotte, NC, or the rural South as testing-grounds for a pilot audience engagement campaign in the US. Such focus is invaluable to the ensuring success, for testing scalability and for maximizing resources. As independent filmmakers with limited resources, we can't afford to work without identifying a clear focus and engaging in as much advance planning.

And that's another way in which Chicken and Egg is an unusual funder: By giving a full range of support services to its grantees, is actually helps save money.

Our School at the Good Pitch

This spring we had the chance to pitch Our School in the Good Pitch, a forum initiated by the Sundance Institute and the BritDoc Foundation to bring documentary film projects with a mission before funders, broadcasters and potential outreach partners. Our School was selected for the first North American edition of the Good Pitch, held at the 2009 HotDocs festival forum. We got to present our project to a large table of interested foundations, broadcasters, executive producers and NGOs, and to develop meaningful, long-lasting and (we already know it) productive relationships that will help bring our film into the world and ensure its impact. Added bonus: We got to see Alin, in our development trailer, on a big screen for the first time, before hundreds of people gathered at the forum. Oh, and: The pitch was good. Of course.