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,

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: 

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.]

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.

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.

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.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Roma Day Message

The Department of State issued this video message for International Roma Day - April 8.