The making of the Oscar-nominated movie "Music by Prudence" is a tale of two schools, one in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and one in Baltimore.

A favorite for best short documentary at tonight's Academy Awards, this 33-minute flight presents an affecting portrait of its tough, gifted title character, the singer-songwriter in a band of disabled youths at the King George VI School & Centre for Children With Physical Disabilities in Bulawayo.

Prudence Mabhena suffers from arthrogryposis, a condition that deforms joints and cost her both her legs. But at the King George VI School she transcended the physical limitations and social stigma of her disorder. There she discovered the power of her singing and her writing, and with her partners formed the Afro-fusion marimba band Liyana.

Tonight, Mabhena attends the Academy Awards. She would not have gotten there were it not for another school: Baltimore's Maryland Institute College of Art. The chief of MICA's video and film arts department, Patrick Wright, earned the credit of co-producer and associate editor and supplied critical equipment and talent for producer-director Roger Ross Williams and producer Elinor Burkett.

In "Music by Prudence," Mabhena and her partners express anger and hope musically, even in impromptu moments. Contrasting a decrepit society with a lush, inviting countryside, this film is more complex and involving than conventional inspirational tales.

In the King George VI School, Liyana's musicians find a haven from the widespread Zimbabwean belief that children born with disabilities are the spawn of witchcraft. Mabhena's paternal grandmother told her mother not to breast-feed her. Her mother left her father (and the country) and remarried. Only the girl's maternal grandmother offered support - and only the King George VI School gave her a way to find her voice.

MICA has helped give her an audience. Several MICA students worked on the film, performing tasks that included logging footage and digitally tweaking the soundtrack. Errol Webber Jr., a 2008 graduate, shares credit for the cinematography, and MICA funded two flights to Zimbabwe.

Burkett, who spends half the year in Bulawayo and half the year in upstate New York, had her eureka moment when she "went to a Liyana performance at the National Gallery of Art in Bulawayo, housed in an old colonial building. I was late, and they were already performing, their music permeating the entire structure, as I raced up the steps. When I walked into the gallery where they were set up, I saw the film - in that way reporters so often 'see' their stories even before they've reported them." She soon "pulled in Roger Williams, a neighbor of mine in the Catskills who'd been bugging me to find a good documentary story."

Over the phone from Los Angeles, Williams explains, "I had been working in television, and wanted to make an independent movie in Africa." Williams got in touch with Inez Hussey, director of the King George VI School. Hussey sent Williams tapes of Mabhena and Liyana. When he watched them, Williams says, "I burst into tears. I thought, 'This is amazing. This is it, this is the story.' "

After talking to Wright at Burkett's suggestion, Williams went to Zimbabwe on Christmas Day and shot for two weeks in January 2008, when MICA was on winter break. Wright lent Williams his own equipment and some of MICA's. A new father, Wright never entertained the thought of flying to Zimbabwe himself. That country, always a tinderbox, was entering the turmoil of an election year in which President Robert Mugabe would use violence to shut down his opposition. Journalistic coverage of the campaign was risky and illegal.

But when the production needed help, Wright stepped up - and so did MICA. Wright's allies included Guna Nadarajan, vice provost for research, whose office provided seed money. Wright cut trailers with Williams that set off a buzz in independent-film circles and led to HBO backing the movie. MICA allowed Wright a partial leave last spring to continue working on it. "And when it came to supporting Errol's travel," Wright says, "they knew it was an amazing opportunity for one of our students."

Wright had been Webber's teacher. He recognized Webber's "amazing eye and good [cinematic] instincts." In March 2008, Wright asked Webber if he'd like to go to Zimbabwe to shoot a movie. Webber said yes immediately.

Webber learned a lot from Liyana. "These band members don't want people to feel sorry for them," he says. "They try by all means every day to be as independent as possible, and I like that about them. They're outgoing and don't expect any pity and don't deserve it. After filming them very personally for many months, I'm amazed at what they can do."

Webber moved with his family to Baltimore from Jamaica in 2002. Williams, who is African-American, specifically wanted Webber to shoot the "verite" sections of the movie for reasons that had as much to do with age as with race. Williams knew Webber could capture the band members at their most casual and spontaneous. Webber was 21, and the band members were in their teens and early 20s. (Another Baltimore-bred cameraman, Osato Dixon, shot the first two weeks with Williams; Derek Wiesehahn, Williams' long-term director of photography, shot key interviews and montages and helped Williams devise the overall visual strategy for the movie.)

Webber used a filmmaking tactic honed in his video business. Even when he shoots a wedding, he first comes at his subjects "incredibly close; I will get so close to you that it's uncomfortable! But look at it this way: ... Imagine me filming you up close being like a bomb going off; me being there for a month is like a truck backfiring. Once they've been exposed to the brute force of the camera and me up close, it's no big deal for me to film them from 6, 7 and 8 feet away."

Webber declares his affection for Jamaica, but his senior project at MICA, a video installation, was based on a horrific episode from his youth there. The Webbers lived on a "border area" between two political parties. "Every time there was a tiny little political upheaval, we'd see a police car or, occasionally, a tank. ... There was some heavy gunfire one night that woke us up. The protocol was for us to run into the center corridor of the house, because at least there were two cinder-block walls to protect us on either side. ... Then we heard a horn continually honk. ... Why was someone pressing the horn so long? We went up to the window and saw a police car being pushed. The police officer was shot and his head was on the horn. I could recognize the faces surrounding the car then, but they left my head. A bunch of people lit paper and threw it in the car and set the car on fire. And the car horn just kept on honking, until morning, with the car burning."

Webber might appear to have led a charmed (or blessed) life, but he knows something about the persistence of trauma. So does Mabhena. If "Music by Prudence" wins an Oscar, she won't be able to join the producers at the podium. The Kodak Theatre stage is not wheelchair-accessible from the audience.

But Williams says Mabhena will have the satisfaction of seeing a prophecy come true. Long before the nomination, she had told him, "Roger, you will win an Oscar."