Courtesy Julie Jontz Lang for Country School: One Room - One Nation.
Filmmakers Tammy and Kelly Rundle of Fourth Wall Films spent two years visiting over 100 one-room schools throughout the Midwest for their award-winning Country School: One Room – One Nation. The crowd-pleasing documentary will celebrate its 10th Anniversary with a special free virtual screening on Sunday, November 22 at 3:00 p.m. (CST) via the Fourth Wall Films Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/Fourth-Wall-Films-173844695995934. A LIVE Q&A with the filmmakers will follow the screening.
“We have so much to celebrate these ten years since Country School was first released,” said producer Tammy Rundle. “We received our first Mid-America Emmy® nomination for Country School, it has screened in film festivals and other special events across the country, it has aired on PBS stations, and it was released nationally on DVD.”
Courtesy Julie Jontz Lang for Country School: One Room - One Nation.
“The film is as much a tribute to the teaching profession as it is an homage to rural schools,” said director Kelly Rundle. “One woman or man teaching all eight grades in a single room is the ultimate example of multi-tasking.”
Over 80 hours of interviews, vistas, and historic sites shot in all four seasons in Iowa, Kansas, and Wisconsin were distilled down to a feature-length film that tells the dramatic true story of the life, death, and rebirth of one-room schools in the Upper Midwest.
“They did what they were supposed to do,” said historian Dorothy Schwieder. “There was a time when they met the needs of society. There was also a time when they ceased to meet the needs of society.”
Reed School in Neillsville, Wisconsin.
Film critic Mike Schulz of the River Cities Reader wrote, "Country School: One Room – One Nation emerges as a definitive portrait of education in a one-room environment, a work that's every bit as informative, engaging and impassioned as those telling its tales."
Schoolhouse near Colby, Kansas.
Along with nostalgia, the Rundles’ journey revealed a few surprises: guns in school, bullying, lunch-stealing ponies, severe weather stories, a country school designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the passion former students, teachers, and preservationists have for these sometimes forgotten and neglected little schools that still dot the rural landscape.
Country School also examines how one-room schools Americanized European and Eastern European immigrants during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
“One-room schools are a page in American history that is turning, and perhaps in another generation or two, there will be no one left to tell the story,” said writer Bill Samuelson.
Bennington No. 4 in Waterloo, Iowa.
Country School: One Room – One Nation was funded in part by the Wisconsin Humanities Council, Humanities Iowa, the Kansas Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Silos and Smokestacks National Heritage Area.
Fourth Wall Films is a film and video production and distribution company formerly based in Los Angeles and now based in the Iowa-Illinois Quad Cities.
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