Filmmaking as Activism? with Mona Nicoara Bad Feminists Making Films

What does it mean to be a human rights activist and advocate and a filmmaker at the same time? Are they one identity or two separate endeavors? We talk to Romanian-born human rights activist and filmmaker Mona Nicoara about two of her films: Our School, a documentary following the de-segregation efforts meant to integrate Roma children in the Romanian school system; and The Distance Between Me and Me, a documentary centering Nina Cassian, a controversial Romanian poet whose complicated relationship with the totalitarian communist regime eventually led to her exile to the U.S. Mona’s exploration of the intersection of human rights and filmmaking, elucidates some of the ways in which the two might complement one another, how the practices relate, as well as the tensions that arise at their confluence.