Breaking the Spell: An Interview with Mona Nicoara

Mona Nicoara photo reproduced from DokWeb.net - Institute of Documentary Film

[This interview with Magda Španihelová originally appeared on DokWeb, the website of the Institute for Documentary Film in the Czech Republic. The IDF has been supporting this project since we first applied to pitch before television commissioning editors gathered at the East European Forum in Jihlava - back in 2006. We are so grateful for everything they have been doing for this film, and for Eastern European documentary more broadly.]

Institute of Documentary Film is pleased that five years after East European Forum pitching in Jihlava, Mona returns back with Our School among the 11 best feature documentaries of the East Silver Market 2011, wrapping up the year-round big time. The probe into the racial injustice in Romanian countryside spoke to international film festival programmers from Visions du reél in Nyon, Prague’s One World, through Tribeca Film Festival in New York City and Thessaloniki IFF, to DOK Liepzig, or domestic Transilvania IFF. The film also managed to reach for Sterling Award for the Best American Feature documentary at Silverdocs. Moreover, Our School is ambitions enough to reach beyond theatres and become a tool used to trigger discussions on the level legislation, as it already did with a screening in US Congress.

1/ You have been following the story of Roma community and the desegregation process for four years. The film is now finished and you are on a successful festival tour. Are you still trying to follow up children’s life in the community or is this topic closed for you?

We have formed a very strong bond with the children. We often talk to them and keep coming back to Targu Lapus any time we can. Sometimes we find ourselves asking the kids about their grades and about their life at home as if we were some sort of annoying, intrusive aunts. We know very well that these are relationships that go on for a very long time. But if you are asking whether we are going to go back and shoot another film there - we can’t answer that now, we just don’t know.

2/ As a human-rights activist you have showed longstanding interest in the issue of Roma’s ethnic segregation. So you knew that the whole process of desegregation was failing from its very beginning when the money dedicated for the integration of Roma’s children into “normal” schools were used for the community school renovation. Did you have any ambition to react, try to oppose or just somehow influence it? Or was it from the beginning the idea to point out this bad approach to the whole process of desegregation?

Our initial intention was to film an integration process, so we looked for a place where it seemed things are going to work out. And Targu Lapus looked very promising that way when we first scouted locations. It wasn’t until a few months into the first year of shooting when we realized that things might not turn out as well as we had initially hoped. It’s hard to know if and when and which people in town knew that the integration project was not meant to succeed. The authorities in Targu Lapus had originally promised they would integrate the Roma children and turn the old segregated school into an after-school or a school readiness center - so the idea that the building would become once more a fully functional school serving only the Roma children in the community came to us as a total surprise. We don’t believe in segregation, and we could not witness something like that without feeling complicit. It was apparent to us that the Roma kids were expected to move back to the segregated school, so we mentioned it to the people in the Ministry of Education who were supervising the integration project and had directed us to Targu Lapus in the first place - but we don’t know where it went from there. When the European Court of Human Rights judgment in the D.H. vs Czech Republic case came down, with all the changes in national regulations that flowed from it, we were very relieved, since we knew that the kids could not be moved back to the segregated school. Once more, we thought that the film would have a happy ending. But by the time we came back for the final shoot, we found that the children had already been moved into a third school. It was heartbreaking. In fact, it still is.

3/ Behind the camera you are more likely in the role of an observer. When/why you had adopted the observer’s role?

We knew even before we started shooting that this would be a film about understanding - about looking into something we think we know but never really see, about grasping complexity as such, without reductive explanations or over-simplification. The vérité approach was the only option that seemed true to that intention and stylistically viable for us. We wanted to let the audience experience and understand things by themselves as much as possible. We hoped the apparent immediacy of this approach would help us remove a layer of mistrust and preconceived notions, and allow viewers to simply watch, follow, and hopefully empathize directly with each of our participants, on their own terms.

4/ The viewers can’t see you in any interaction of confrontation with local people; you are not performing in the movie. Were those scenes removed on purpose or these situations just didn’t happen?

We never inserted ourselves in any situation, much less try to provoke or change a situation by intervening in it. This was simply not part of the conception for this project. Also, it would have gotten us in real trouble in some situations, like the classroom, were the last thing we wanted to do was to disrupt the teaching process. The teachers would have chased us out of the classroom if we ever intervened, rightfully so - and that would have been the end of the project. This was never meant to be a film about us - it’s a film about three children and the world they live in. We just wanted to follow the lives of our participants, as respectfully and unobtrusively as we could. Audiences do hear, though, our presence in the interviews - and only there. We thought it would be much more honest to the viewers to leave the questions in, and that it would help viewers understand our position as filmmakers and the dynamics of our presence there as a crew.

5/ There are some racist statements in the film (the teacher calls the work with Roma as working in toxic surrounding) – Did it touch you personally? Did you feel the need to give a loud response to this?

Of course it was hard to hear all the casual racism. We sometimes pressed people on those points in interviews and tried to save them, as it were, from their own statements - but we rarely got different responses as a result. Racism against Roma at the level of discourse is so engrained, even socially acceptable, that people don’t give it a second thought. But we also have to remember the flip-side of that: Sometimes racist statements are nothing more than reflexes. For instance, some of the Romanian adults who treated Roma kids fairly and with no prejudice would casually toss around all sorts of negative stereotypes about the Roma. But their actions clearly contradicted their words. We also saw that people whom we saw engaging in politically correct discourse didn’t always believe in what they were saying or act on it. That was an important lesson for us.  As filmmakers, we tried to stay true to people’s character, rather than judge people by their words alone.

6/ Did you think over the film structure (the main child protagonists etc.) in advance and how much? Or is the film rather an editing room result based on the footage you got?

It is both. We knew from the very beginning that we wanted to have three main protagonists and create a longitudinal project following a process that has beginning, middle and end. Chronology and outward narrative gave us a good scaffolding that way, but it also placed some interesting creative limitations on what we could do in terms of emotional structure and story. We edited for almost a year and a half - and a good half of that was dedicated solely to working out the emotional structure of the story, as well as character definition and development within the frame of a chronological narrative.

7/ Originally, the movie should have been edited by Jonathan Oppenheim, but it was finally edited by Erin Casper and Jonathan remained a consultant. Did he make any particular interventions to the film structure? This kind of long-run, personal shooting sometimes makes the director lose the healthy distance from the topic. Doesn’t it make, in these cases, the editor’s point-of-view the most fundamental one? How was it in your case?

Indeed, both Jonathan and Erin are full creative partners with us on this project. Jonathan and Erin started working alongside each other on our first assembly, and Jonathan stayed on working on big picture structure and style through to the very end, while Erin took the lead doing hands-on editing. Together they helped us shape a stronger story, teasing out telling details and snatching wonderful instances of humor out of an otherwise grim reality. Erin was fantastic at working on emotional structure and digging out these little scenes, gestures, and images that we would have easily overlooked ourselves. Jonathan kept us true to our original intentions and made sure that we didn’t drown them out by being didactic or unnecessarily expository. We are incredibly lucky to have had both of them working on this film.

8/ Both you and Miruna Coca-Cozma are signed under the movie as directors, which, in fact, eventuated as late as the shooting has begun... How did this happen?

Miruna and I went to high school together and have remained close friends over the years. We share the same values, the same understanding of social justice and of the ways in which art can contribute to making our world better. Working together on this came very naturally. When Miruna came on board right after the development phase, as co-director,  we knew each other enough to be fully aware that we would never be able to formally divide responsibilities (though we tried - there is a memo lost somewhere in time that represents our futile attempt at fixing our fluid relationship). We basically just took turns directing specific shoots and conducting interviews. Of course, we had our differences too, which ended up being quite productive: Miruna, thankfully, has more technical skills than I - she did some great shooting on the project, and set up the sound system, while I fretted over things like our relationships to the participants. She also has a more journalistic mind when approaching the documentary form. I, on the other hand, approach it more like a novel - a non-fiction novel, if you will. I think the project benefited a great deal from the need to forge a road between our two approaches.

9/ Your movie does a perfect job in capturing not only the universal problem of discrimination and segregation of minorities, but also the mutual prejudices of social majority and minority. Thanks to this universality, as well as certain portion of representativeness (the school as basic social experience), your film is very strong, communicating its contents well. Do you think this is key fact of its success?

Yes, I think viewers respond very strongly to both the specificity of the story and its universal aspects. The combination seems to be quite effective that way. And it still surprises us to see people in New York or Seoul moved by the story of these three kids in a Transylvanian town that doesn't even have as much as a railroad station. It is extremely rewarding to see how audiences from various corners of the world, with experiences that are often so different from those of the kids who participated in Our School, connect to this film.

10/ The segregation of minorities is a significant subject in the whole Europe, even in our country the Roma community and its segregation is very topical. Is your movie able help this issue in any specific ways?

We hope that this film will be used as a primary document to help policy-makers and activists in their work, and we intend to work another couple of years helping that along. We are already working with partners such as Amnesty International, the Roma Education Fund, the European Roma Rights Center, and the Open Society Institute, as well as national Roma rights and anti-discrimination NGOs to use the film to advance the understanding of race relations and education reform all around Europe. We are planning community screenings in places dealing with segregation, screenings in the European Parliament and in national legislatures, discussion guides for teachers and community organizers, and a good set of web resources that will extend the life of the film beyond the festival circuit and the cinemas.

11/ With your project Our School you participated at the East European Forum in 2006. Today, you are back in Jihlava with a finished movie which is, furthermore, nominated to the Silver Eye Award. How do you perceive this closing circle?

It’s a fantastic and humbling honor to be nominated for the Silver Eye Award. It is always great to come full circle - and in the case of Jihlava, even more so, because in many ways this was our proving ground. When we came to the pitching forum in 2006, we were very early on in the process: We knew our intentions, we had done a couple of shoots, but we barely knew our own project. The East European Forum was tremendously helpful in honing our focus, developing the best battle plan for the film, and gaining a confident footing early on. It also helped us start a community around the film: We formed relationships there that stayed with us throughout the life of the film, and we ended up getting feedback on multiple cuts from a number of fellow filmmakers whom we first met at the Forum. We wouldn’t have been able to come this far along without the Forum. Last, but not at all least, the Institute of Documentary Film, which does a fantastic job tracking Forum alumni and promoting Eastern European documentaries more generally, has done a great and relentless job of supporting our film over the years. We can only hope we did well by them.

21st Century Segregation in Europe

The bridge Roma kids have to cross on the way to school Photo credit: Ovidiu Marginean (c) Sat Mic Film, LLC

[Blog post by Producer-Director Mona Nicoara, initially published on the Open Society Foundations blog. Our School was supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.]

I started working on Our School in 2005, mainly out of frustration. As a human rights activist, I had seen the excellent work of NGOs who had been working for years to document, litigate, and advocate against the widespread, insidious, often intractable practice of segregating Roma children into separate classes, schools, or even special schools for children with mental disabilities, get little traction in the public imagination. When I started the project, my friends and family back in Romania were puzzled: Surely segregation can’t exist in a European country, so what exactly was I going to document?

Indeed, five years and three European Court of Human Rights judgments later, the issue has remained largely invisible in the public mind. This is as much a failure of the imagination—that which we do not know about must not exist—as it is a symptom of the tremendous social distance between Roma and non-Roma: Roma and their problems are to be avoided or at best pitied, but never understood on their own terms or, even more alarmingly, engaged with. It’s as if we lived side by side, on facing banks of the same river, yet unable or unwilling to cross the bridge to the other side.

Once our project got underway and we finally had visible, filmed proof of segregated education, this attitude generated a second line of questioning. Friends, family, and colleagues began asking: How did we get that kind of access? What exactly did we have to do for families to allow us to film children waking up and washing up for school, or for teachers to allow us to film their classes? Implicit in those questions is the assumption that Roma are a closed, secretive, society, as well as the insinuation that Roma would open up only for material gain—that a toll would have to be extracted to cross the bridge, as it were.

Our answer still engenders disbelief and disappointment: We went there, introduced ourselves and the project to everyone, and asked for permission to film. The small Romanian town where we filmed, Targu Lapus, prides itself on its hospitality—as well they should. There were no obstacles, no promises extracted, no conditions imposed. From the Roma and non-Roma families we followed to the Ministry of Education, from school principals to substitute teachers, everyone cooperated in the spirit that independent documentation helps improve our collective understanding of what seems to be an intractable problem.

There is tremendous generosity in our participants’ willingness to go along with a project that may not help them directly, but can hopefully advance our grasp of the issue. We felt a huge burden of responsibility to do justice to that kind of openness and candor, and we wanted to fairly represent the position of all stakeholders.

We discovered that it wasn’t easy. It is always easier to make a one-sided piece than to build a complex story, and the temptation to simplify your message as you get closer to reaching a broader public is always there. Some broadcasters wanted a hard-hitting current affairs-type investigation. Some funders wanted a more streamlined story line. But we always knew that, in order to create a lasting, emotional connection to the issue, we had to do justice to all sides. In other words, the film had to work as a mirror in which every one of us can recognize themselves, and in which every one of us begin to see and question the structural barriers that keep us apart.

A rickety makeshift bridge that some of the Roma kids had to cross on their way to school every day came to embody that problem for us. Seeing seven-year-old kids cross the narrow wooden ladder perilously perched over a body of water brought out my deepest fears as a mother, and my worst anxieties as a producer. But because we felt we owed it to the children to try to cross the bridge ourselves, we tried to do so, and failed—repeatedly, miserably, sometimes comically. We realized that the bridge was just one, very small, part of what these kids were up against, every day of their life.

But the bridge was not an obstacle only for the kids. It was as much of an obstacle for adults. How were teachers expected to do their duty and visit these children’s homes? How were they supposed to understand these children if they never saw how they live? How are administrators and policy-makers supposed to make decisions about something they never see?

The least we could do was to show them the bridge, to give them a bit of access to the lives of the Roma, and have them listen to the voices of these children. And to hope that, just as everyone cooperated with this film project, they would be willing to cooperate with understanding the cultural, economic, and emotional mechanisms which need to be dismantled in order to bring about real change and to make crossing social bridges not only possible, but banal.

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.

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 is Back at the Independent Film Week

This is our second time around at IFP's Independent Film Week in New York City. The first time around, in 2008, we were coming off of working on Our School out of Eastern Europe for nearly three years, in virtual isolation from much of the global documentary film community. Being accepted to the Independent Film Week felt like a major breakthrough. That's because it was one: At the 2008 event we had meetings with all the major funders and broadcasters in the US, and many of those relationships bore fruit over the next two years. We also made friends with other filmmakers, and learned that there is power - or at least strength - in solidarity, pooled resources, shared advice, and the wide availability of shoulders to occasionally cry on. And we had our first mention in IndieWire - always fun to see that. 

This year we're taking fewer meetings than the first time around, because we already have relationships with almost everyone in the field, and have been meeting them outside the framework of the Independent Film Week. The novelty has been replaced by pressure - to make a good film, to finish it, to set it up for a good launch. Luckily, we're here with the IFP Lab, which is seeing us through another round of boot camp preparations - this time in terms of marketing, festival strategy, and distribution. So, at the end of the day, we're just as overwhelmed. Which is a good thing, although it may not sound that way.

Kids Grow Up

We went for our last shoot in Targu Lapus earlier this month. We found the children grown, different, more aware. Take a look at Alin in 2006, age 8:

Alin Moldovan in 2006, age 8. Photo credit: Ovidiu Marginean (c) Sat Mic Film, LLC

And here is Alin in 2010, age 12:

Alin Moldovan in 2006, age 12. Photo credit: Mona Nicoara (c) Sat Mic Film, LLC

Throughts from the 2010 IFP Lab

A couple of days into the IFP Documentary Lab, we began admitting to each other with increasing frequency that our heads are spinning. This, it turns out, is not so much a complaint as a battle cry.

Part nurturing cocoon for the creative process and part scared straight film camp, this crash course in finishing compresses in one week a preview of what all of us are inevitably going to go through in the last year of finishing and releasing our work. The result is curiously energizing. Bracing, one might say.

We started off gently, sharing clips and stories about our projects and taking in feedback on our cuts from an amazing group of editing advisers. In the process, we learned as much from hearing the discussion on other projects as we learned from the feedback sessions devoted to our own projects. (And we got to see some spectacularly successful pairings of experienced advisers and first-time filmmakers who practically started talking to each other in code within seconds of meeting each other.)

Then, as we moved into the finishing boot camp, we started to feel a bit like first-year med students doing dissection: excited to get some real-life knowledge, but not so thrilled yet about the prospect of dealing with all the guts and entrails.

The result is much like learning to ski: the slopes ahead of us after this week feel no less steep, but at least now we’ll know how to make it to the bottom in one piece.

Here is some of the wisdom we’ll carry with us as we brace ourselves for the trip:

• The whole process of filmmaking is about intention, a shimmering concept that encompasses choice-making, planning, social change goals, and - hopefully - meaning. Everything else follows from intention. This fact so obvious that we very frequently lose sight of it.
   
• The temptation to prematurely make things perfect is ultimately counter-productive. Imperfection is close friends with creativity, and bad ideas are often adjacent to the best ideas.

• Everyone is struggling. Hopefully. If you’re not struggling, you’re not digging deep enough to make the best movie you can - as our editing adviser, the wonderfully empowering Mary Lampson (Harlan County, Trouble the Water) said to us: “You have what's going on. But what matters is what is really going on.”
   
• You have to devote one hundred and twenty per cent of your time to making the best film you can. The other one hundred and twenty per cent of your time must go into raising the money to finish the film and getting it out into the world.

[This post initially appeared on the IFP blog on April 16, 2010. Our School was selected by the Independent Filmmaker Project to participate in the 2010 Documentary Lab, a year-long fellowship for projects in post-production, in the 2008 and 2010 Independent Film Week Spotlight on Documentaries meet market, and in the fiscal sponsorship program - all organized by the IFP. We are extraordinarily grateful of IFP's longstanding support thoughout the life of this project, and particularly to the wonderfully visionary and tireless Milton Tabbot and Rose Vincelli.]

We're very happy to be selected to be part of the Docs in Thessaloniki pitching forum organized by the European Documentary Forum this year. At the end of several days of training, we'll get to pitch to European broadcasters and sales agents once more - this is only our second formal pitching forum in Europe, following the 2006 East European Forum in Jihlava, Czech Republic. Since then We've had a chance to present the project in the US - at the 2008 Independent Film Week and the 2009 Sundance Creative Producting Summit - but this is the first time in a long while that we get to present Our School in a European context. Keep your fingers crossed!

Our School at the Sundance Documentary Lab

Editor Erin Casper working at the Sundance Documantary Lab. Photo credit: Mona Nnicoara (c) Sat Mic Film, LLC

We are the luckiest documentary film project in the world. We had a full, fantastic week at the Sundance Documentary Lab in Utah. A fantastic creative privilege in a stimulating environment, with some of the best advisers - documentary film directors and editors - and filmmaker "classmates" on this earth. A week of continuous feedback and almost round-the-clock work that allowed us to better understand our project, take it to the next level, and generally make more progress in one week than in two months of editing. We're too exhausted to be more specific, so instead we'll share another photo which gives you the flavor of feedback sessions at the Lab:

Editors Jonathan Oppenheim and Erin Casper at the Sundance Lab. Photo credit: Mona Nicoara (c) Sat Mic Film, LLC

The Sundance Creative Producing Summit is next. Can hardly wait.

How We Do It

Director of Photography Ovidiu Marginean and Co-Director Miruna Coca-Cozma. Photo credit: Mona Nicoara

This is what a shoot for Our School looks like. No, really.

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.

The Old Segregated School in Dileu

The segregated school in Dileu in May 2006. Photo credit: Mona Nicoara

This is how the school looked until May 2006, before work began on it. It was a one-room school with no toilet - and often no running water. A wood-burning stove smoked up the whole room in the winter. 

The Roma remember this school being here for generations - at least since the 1930s. They say their grandparents made the bricks - the main trade in this community used to be brick-making, until industrial production put them out of business. It was always a Roma school. There is no memory of Romanian or Hungarian children coming to this school. For generations, those parents who wanted to enroll their children in the mainstream school were directed here. 

The school is about 2 km away from the center of town, where the mainstream school is. Since the Roma are spread out in several communities around Targu Lapus, some children would have to walk as much as 6 km into town, pass by the mainstream school in the center, and continue to walk another 2 km to reach "their" school - the segregated all-Roma school in Dileu.  Dana is one of those children. Alin, however, lives right there, a few short steps up the hill from the school.

The teachers changed at least one a year. Not that it made any difference - every teacher who came through, the parents say, would come in late, around 9 or 10 am, work a bit with the children, then let them out for a long recess. By 12 pm, the whole school day would be over. Extremely few children who finished 4th grade here would be able to go on to the high school in the center of town - let alone keep up there.

When we came scouting, we asked for directions to get the school. We kept passing the building without noticing it, until finally we saw the plaque above the door. Our driver exclaimed: "I thought it was a public toilet!"