Donna Musil
Donna Musil
Brats: Our Journey Home
BRATS: Our Journey Home is a seven-year work of passion by independent filmmaker Donna Musil. It won the Southern Lens Award, Best Documentary and Best First Time Director’s Award. It has been broadcast on AFN Television worldwide (outside the United States), and has been featured on CNN’s “This Week at War,” NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the Stars & Stripes, Associated Press, and in many more television shows, radio programs, newspapers, and websites around the world.
Donna also co-founded Brats Without Borders in 1999, one of the few nonprofit organizations that serve military “brats” and “third culture kids” of all ages. Brats Without Borders recently received a generous grant from The Sprint Foundation to continue their educational outreach program, Operation Military Brat.
Before embarking on BRATS, Donna wrote a variety of scripts, including Ananse, a children’s animated film based on African folktales, in development with Visionex/Ghana and Melendez Films/London. She co-directed a staged reading of her original feature, To Kingdom Come, with Producer Judith Pearlman, in NY Women in Film & TV’s Screenplay Reading Series, representing “some of the best developing women screenwriters.”
Other credits include Rebuilding America’s Communities, The Carter Center documentary about inner-city poverty (PBS, 1997 WorldFest Int’l Film Festival Silver Award), and dozens of educational and industrial films for Coca-Cola, BellSouth, and M&M Mars/Snickers. Donna was on the Board of Directors for Women in Film/Atlanta, and has been awarded Hambidge Center (GA), Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), Helene Wurlitzer Foundation (Taos), and Centrum Arts (Port Townsend, Washington) writer’s fellowships.
Prior to her writing career, Donna worked as an attorney with the AFL-CIO and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, helping organize unions throughout the South. She has a J.D. and B.A./Journalism (magna cum laude) from the University of Georgia and is a member of the State Bar of Georgia.
And that is Donna’s vision – that the BRATS film might be a spark in a global fire of self-awareness and belonging – that from the ashes of war might rise a nation of children committed to peace.
