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90-Secod Cinema: Children Underground
Children Underground, an excerpt

Romania’s anti-contraception laws have orphanages and shelters overflowing with needy children, inevitably spilling the older ones over onto the streets. In the late 1990s, Bucharest’s Piata Victoriei (Victory Plaza) was inhabited by a gang of homeless youth who openly begged, played and slept inside the central metro station.

Edet Belzberg’s Children Underground centers around five of these children, ages 8-16, their back-stories and their plight as various aid groups struggle to get them off the streets and into good homes and schools.

In this Clip, Ana, 10, and her brother Marian, 8, are sleeping fitfully on some cardboard when gang leader Cristina rouses them.  Ana has broken a reusable glass bottle and must go up to the street and beg money to repay the shop owner. 

Belzberg shows the empty station, closed to passengers but filled with the echoing voices of its many young inhabitants. She pans over to show the two tiny bodies of Ana and Marian, their arms tucked inside their shirts for warmth. They sleep deeply despite the ruckus.

The alternate shots of the children’s sleeping faces, covered in dirt and lacerations, are difficult to watch. They look even younger than they are, surely stunted by malnutrition. Their infantile expressions as they sleep amid the grime betray the vulnerability they constantly have to mask with tough-guy posturing during the day.

Ana and Marian are central to the film perhaps because they are the youngest. Even if they are eventually taken into shelters, they will never recover emotionally from their experience on the streets.

- Ariana Costakes

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Excellent work of a darker side

Posted on Jun 6, 2011 by amit sen