The Library and the School of Education present a screening of the film Our School with special guest, director Mona Nicoara, on Tuesday, Apr. 21 in the Library Archives (Building 1L, Room 216) from 2:30pm to 5:00pm.
Mona Nicoara was born in communist Romania and, until 1989, dedicated her early years to becoming a poet in a small, largely underground community of young writers who did not abide by the conventions of the Ceausescu era. After the 1989 Revolution, she began mixing creative work with human rights activism for groups like the Romanian Helsinki Committee, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, and continued these parallel tracks after moving to New York in 1995 to pursue graduate studies at Columbia University. She started working in film in 1997 as an Associate Producer for Children Underground (2001), which received the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Her directorial debut, Our School (2011), premiered in the U.S. at the Tribeca Film Festival, and was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Best U.S. Feature at SilverDocs 2011. In 2012, the film won Best International Feature at the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival. The U.S. Helsinki Commission hosted a screening of the film in the U.S. Congress in 2011. Two years later, Our School screened in the European Parliament.
