Its Hard to Film a Miracle: Bialik- Rogozin school documentary nominated for an Academy Award

"Strangers No More,” a film profiling the extraordinary Bialik-Rogozin school in Tel Aviv has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Documentary.

Israel's Bialik-Rogozin school, serves 750 refugees and immigrants from forty-eight countries, many escaping persecution, poverty, and even genocide. The award winning American filmmakers, Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon have made over twenty documentaries. They followed three children at the school for 15 months. There are currently 21 Sudanese refugees at Bialik-Rogozin, who arrived with no formal education. The school has become a model for educating at-risk children around the country, and truly, around the world.

The directors have said “It’s hard to film a miracle” . The school provides evening Hebrew classes for both parents and children. There are cultural activities for the students, educational testing and intervention, diagnostic testing for children in need and hot lunches. The school is open from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. “We want to be like a home, and a home doesn’t close at 1 in the afternoon,” explained Karen Tal, the schools principal. Although 60 percent of the students come from single-parent homes and nearly all of them are from extremely poor families , the dropout rate is currently 5 percent.

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UPDATE: Feb 28, 2011

Directors Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon won an Oscar Sunday night for their film "Strangers No More" in the category for Documentary Short Subject !