Documentary Description
Easily one of the most astonishing and engaging cinematic works of
the past decade, CHILDREN UNDERGROUND is a profoundly intimate and
heart-wrenching drama — an Academy Award Nominee for Best Documentary
Feature in 2001, and winner at nearly every major documentary film
festival across the country.
In a style that is altogether shocking, brutal, and deeply
humanistic, filmmaker Edet Belzberg transports us to the streets of
Bucharest, Romania, where we are introduced to a “family” of five
homeless children begging on the streets and living in subway tunnels,
drug addicted, and painfully unaware of the cruel horrors of their
soul-crushing existence.
As the children’s story unfolds, the windows to their individual
lives open up, revealing a harrowing day-to-day struggle for
survival–from ten-year-old Ana, unfailingly maternal towards her
younger brother Marian despite daily beatings from shopkeepers and
other street-children, to Mihai, and unusually intelligent and
motivated twelve-year-old who slashes at his arms and dreams of a
better life.
In CHILDREN UNDERGROUND, the images captured by Belzberg’s
unflinching lens are so powerful and captivating that the camera
quickly vanishes from the viewer’s mind. What is left behind is a
devastating portrait of human anguish and suvffering more riveting and
absorbing than anything ever before captured on screen.
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