Children Underground previously at Film Forum in New York City

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Scene from Children Underground Special Jury Prize - Sundance 2001

Produced and Directed by Edet Belzberg
USA, 2001
105 Minutes
IN ROMANIAN WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES
Film Source Information

"Gripping and heartbreaking. A brilliant indictment of any society that can allow its most vulnerable to slip into oblivion."
- Robert Koehler, Variety

"Emotionally devastating. Seldom has the struggle for survival been so vividly and painfully portrayed."
- Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter

Five children, age 8 - 16, boys and girls, living in a Bucharest subway station, are filmed for more than a year. They are but a few of the more than 20,000 Romanian street children, the human cost of the Ceausescu regime (1965-1989), which banned abortion and even contraceptive devices in order to increase the country's work force. Unwanted, unloved, they live like a feral pack, foraging for food and water, begging, fighting, playing and fantasizing. The drug of choice is Aurolac, a highly toxic paint derivative whose fumes they inhale, sold over the counter. Like homeless children the world over, they are an undeniable black eye on the face of humanity, captured here with searing honesty.

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Links:

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Selections from Amazon.com:

Rachel and Her Children:
Homeless Families in America
by Jonathan Kozol

No Place to Be:
Voices of Homeless Children
by Judith Berck,
Robert Coles (Not Shown)
Our labor of love:
a Romanian adoption chronicle
by Barbara Canale

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Questions/Comments? E-mail Film Forum. Box Office: 212-727-8110. Independent premieres at Film Forum are selected and programmed by Karen Cooper. © 2001, The Moving Image, Inc. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced without permission. Website Manager: Richard J. Hutchins. This page was last updated on October 3, 2001 .

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