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.

  

Our School Sold Out at Tribeca

The rush tickets line for Our School at the Tribeca Film Festival. Photo credit: Mona Nicoara (c) Sat Mic Film, LLC

New Yorkers have plenty of practice standing on line - for restaurants, for their morning coffee, and, of course, for movies. Still, it was a fantastic surprise to see them lining up to see Our School. We knew that our screenings sold out in advance, in the very first days of their going on sale online to American Express cardholders. But the anticipation went well beyond that: Folks on the line got angry to see the filmmaking team use their passes to get into our own screening (like everyone else, New Yorkers can get unreasonable when left standing for long periods of time). Other folks posted ads for Our School tickets on Craigslist. We felt bad that not everyone who wanted to see the film could see it - but we're grateful for the interest, and sure that there will be more opportunities to screen in New York in the future.

It's no news that New York offers some of the smartest, most opinionated and most engaged festival audiences. It's a joy - and a workout! - to present the film before them and answer their questions. And the outpouring of emotion adds an extra layer of difficulty. We had teachers spontaneously confess to streaming minority and immigrant children into special education programs - right here in the Big Apple. We had visual artists and poets visibly moved by the story of Alin, Beni and Dana. We had policy geeks ask questions about the relationship European Court of Human Rights and the European Union (answer: as they say on facebook, it's complicated). Each screening left us exhausted and elated. 

And so did the festival. It was both strange and moving to see the story of three children living without running water, and sometimes even without electricity, on the outskirts of a very small Transylvanian town come to one of the biggest, highest-profile and most glamorous festivals in the world. We were profoundly honored to be here, and to be able to share the lessons of Our School with the world.

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.

Resegregation by Any Other Name...

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Disintegration
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

We had to share this razor-sharp analysis of re-segregation trends in American politics from last night's Colbert Report. It would be a lot funnier if it wasn't true.

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.