Our School
Director and Producer: Mona Nicoara
Co-Director: Miruna Coca- Cozma
Our School tells the story of Roma children struggling to break the barriers of segregation in a small Transylvanian town.
Roma, also known as “Gypsies,” are Europe’s largest and most persecuted minority. The descendants of former slaves, Romanian Roma continue to live in poverty, at the edges of society. They suffer discrimination in all areas of their life, and their children are often placed in segregated schools which offer no future. Our School documents one of the first integration efforts following a European Court of Human Rights judgment similar to Brown v. Board of Education in the United States.
Our School reveals the detailed and messy workings of race relations in a small Transylvanian town, following the lives of participants from up close in a warm, intimate visual style. The film builds the world in which the participants live by slowly drawing viewers into the minutiae and rhythms of the small Transylvanian town. The arc of the story is constructed around the hopes, wins, and losses of the children themselves. At the same time, the world of the adults who are making crucial decisions for these children (parents, teachers, friends and neighbors), as well as the town as a whole (as represented by the racist mayor or the sympathetic bookstore owner) are also explored to allow viewers to understand the intricate web of motivations which affect the main story line.
Our School shows the way in which human rights principles and well-intentioned policies play on the ground, in the daily lives of those directly affected by them. It takes a close look at the role that local context, history, and culture play in complicating and distorting the dynamics and outcomes of even the most basic and benign efforts for change. At the same time, by telling a compelling human story, the film hopes to extend awareness of segregation beyond a small circle of activists, mobilizing new energies at a moment that is ripe for change and providing a platform for the wider desegregation movement by means of a far-ranging web-based strategy linking audiences to activists and donors.
Principal photography in Romania was completed in 2008, and the project is currently in post-production in New York. Release 2010.
Suggested links for more information
The Roma Education Fund, the leading foundation developing desegregation programs in Europe
Romani CRISS, the leading Roma NGO in Romania
The European Roma Rights Centre
The Decade of Roma Inclusion, a commitment by Central and Eastern European Government to improve the situation of Roma by 2015, with the support of the World Bank and the Open Society Institute
Separate and Unequal, a source book for combating discrimination in education published by the Public Interest Law Institute
Open Society Institute-published data on Roma education
Professor Jack Greenberg of the Columbia Law School, civil rights crusader who helped litigate Brown v. Board of Education, on Roma rights and education in Europe
Video of Senator Hillary Clinton addressing the plight of the Roma at Columbia University
Romanian poet laureate Mircea Cartarescu on Romania’s “Gypsy” problem