Children Underground (9/10)

Added: Jan 20, 2008

From: ariakokoschka

Duration: 10:25

"Children Underground" observes the lives of several Romanian street children in Bucharest's Piata Victoriei train station. These children live in the station's tunnels and corridors, in almost indescribable conditions; they sleep in cardboard, and they beg and steal and prostitute themselves for food and money. Almost without exception they use drugs, especially the inhalant Aurolac, a cheap, toxic paint that coats their faces in silver. The film's story, told in a series of long takes and discrete scenes, is one of depressing sameness. The children bounce in and out of shelters: they fight; they huff paint; they are beaten. These tattered lives, offensive to our every notion of what childhood should be, are carried on in full view of both Bucharest's business commuters and Belzberg's camera. What is shown in the film is a fraction of what actually takes place. That what you see in the film doesn't even compare to what the children endure on a daily basis. A child could be beaten as many as four or five times a day by a passerby, a shopkeeper, another street kid. Former Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu outlawed abortion and contraception and ordered women to bear as many children as possible in his failed effort to increase the Romanian workforce. He was executed on Christmas Day, 1989, but today Romanians live with the fallout from that edict -- and as the film shows, the children are mostly ignored. The film does not shy from documenting scenes of utter destitution and self-abuse. Some of the children spend every waking moment in a drug-addled daze, "huffing" an industrial paint called Aurolac to get high. Their faces are smeared with a sparkling, shimmering, silvery poison. Another scene shows a shopkeeper beating a teenager. Onlookers decline to come to the girl's aid. An estimated 20,000 children live on the streets of Bucharest, Romania's capital and largest city, many finding shelter at night in subway stations. Not all of them are orphans -- some are runaways, escaping poverty or abusive parents, often both. Filmmaker Edet Belzberg spent more than a year recording the lives of five Romanian street kids: Mihai, 12; 8-year-old Marian; Ana, 10; 14-year-old Macarena (a nickname she earned for the dance she's fond of); and Cristina, who at 16 is the street-smart and sometimes brutal leader of a pack of street kids. She dodges sexual abuse and gains respect by cropping her hair and passing as male. Children Underground offers a mind-blowing exploration of the relationship between poverty and moral responsibility. The film accomplishes this in a way that is thoroughly compelling. Whether one subscribes to the emotivist view that all moral statements are simply emotional expressions, one must admit that within the study of ethics (especially applied ethics) emotional appeals play such an influential role that their presence is often welcome or at least tolerated. As such, Children Underground tugs at the audience's heartstrings, winning much sympathy in the process. Though many would deny that the well-off have any moral responsibility towards those who are less fortunate and "do not want to be helped," there are several instances in the film in which its subjects are portrayed to be exactly that; yet, it would be quite surprising to find someone who would deny that these children are not worthy of support. The film also raises an interesting question for documentarians: at what point is the crew of such a film required to interfere on behalf of its subjects' wellbeing? This film in particular raises the question in a unique way, because to answer this question one must weigh the present suffering of the subjects with the potential future good caused by the heightened level of awareness the film spreads.

Channel: Nonprofit

Tags: abandonment  addiction  bucharest  drug  homelesschildren  orphan  poverty  romania  streetchildren 

Rating: 4.86 (7 ratings)    Views: 915    Comments: 5