The feature film Vortex, directed by John Oates from the Child and Youth Studies Group in the Open University's faculty of Education and Language Studies with his Hungarian colleague Csaba Szekeres, won a Premier Award at the British Film Institute on Thursday (24 March). This top award was given by the British Film and Video Council in the Learning on Screen Awards competition 2011.
The film is a co-production by The Open University and the Hunnia Filmstudio, Budapest, and is a documentary that follows the lives of young Roma children and their families living in poverty in a remote village in rural Hungary.
Vortex also won top prize in a Hungarian film festival last year, for its hard-hitting portrait of the lives of an ethnic minority group.
The OU’s Child and Youth Studies group conducts national and international research, including the Young Lives project tracking the development of children in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam over 15 years.
Image: Still from Vortex
