UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A Penn State professor’s latest documentary, “Class of Her Own,” is a finalist for two awards at the Aug. 29-31 Orlando Urban Film Festival.
“Class of Her Own,” directed and produced by award-winning filmmaker Boaz Dvir, an associate professor of journalism in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, also received an Honorable Mention from the Black Indie Filmmakers Association Houston Film Festival and was a finalist for Best Documentary at the Windsor International Black Film Festival in Ontario, Canada.
The Orlando Urban Film Festival will screen the film as an official selection at noon on Aug. 31. The festival’s jury has nominated the 86-minute film — which was recently released on Amazon Prime, Xbox and other major platforms — for Best Documentary and Dvir for Best Documentarian.
Refencing the popular ABC sitcom, Peter Greene of Forbes described “Class of Her Own” as a “real-life mirror of Abbott Elementary.”
At 4 p.m. Sept. 10, “Class of Her Own,” will screen at Eastern Michigan University during a free public event hosted by the Department of Africology and African American Studies in collaboration with the College of Arts & Sciences, the College of Education, and the Ann Arbor Black Film Festival, which showed the documentary earlier this summer. Dvir will introduce the film and participate in a panel discussion following the screening at Eastern Michigan.
“We are looking forward to this important event for the valuable model of transformative teaching and learning that it presents,” said Professor Victor Okafor, head of Eastern Michigan’s Department of Africology and African American Studies.
“Class of Her Own” tells the story of a teacher in a high-need elementary school who rewrote the curriculum to meet her students where they were and used hip-hop, dance and call-and-response to teach reading and math.
The documentary also will screen as an official selection in October at the Monadnock International Film Festival in Keene, New Hampshire, and in November at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. It has screened as an official selection at the Charlotte Black Film Festival, the University Film & Video Association’s annual conference in Cleveland, and the Juneteenth Film Festival in Gainesville, Florida.