Children Underground
|
List Price: Our Price: $9.61 You Save: $10.34 (52%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $9.59 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of Children Underground
Movie Review: Show It To A Teen, Show It To Yourself. Among The Best Of Films.
Summary: 5 Stars
If you are you are reading this review, chances are it is from the privileged side of the digital divide. You're probably using a laptop at a café. Maybe you're using your personal computer at work or at home. Not too far from you, there's a kid who laments their sheltered life. There's a James Dean or a Holden Caulfield who is confronting the numbing insanity of a prosperous American childhood. This kid is growing up a lot like I did, with a full belly and not much to do. They have out-of-touch adult authorities who enforce a dull reality. Just for a day, they wish they could go experience life on the street. They wish they could explore booze and cigarettes and all the other things they aren't allowed to do. They see kids at school who are less supervised. Those kids have so much more fun in life. This kid is depressed. Home does not meet their expectations, even if it fulfills their material needs. She feels trapped by not chasing her expectations of a rich and interesting life in clubs, drugs, and intimacy. Maybe he wants to find out what it's like to be addicted. Maybe she actually believe that parties exist like the ones they stage on sitcoms. Maybe he just stares at cool kids out his parents' minivan window and believes they have a better life.
You need to find this kid and force them to watch Edet Belzberg's Children Underground. Why is it important for kids who grew up like I did to watch a documentary about homeless children in Romania? I'm not sure. The film has a way of sobering any fantasies about street life and addiction. I can't describe what it's like to see these children puff away at plastic bags filled with paint thinner as middle-class adults nonchalantly pass them. Kids of all ages puff away at cigarettes and cut themselves, but it's not rebellious. It's not "cool" or "Goth" or "Emo" or a cultural accessory to being "deep" or "thoughtful." It isn't "stupid" or able to fit within moralistic or social-Darwinist jargon. It is naked poverty and naked mental illness. All of the judgment and persona that American culture invests in poverty and illness seems to melt in the testimony of Romanian children.
Perhaps this documentary is so moving because the "face" of poverty in American popular culture is adult and non-white. This is an illusion but it frames the way in which we think of social ills. Young, white preteens aren't supposed to live lives of drugs, violence, and homelessness. At least, we aren't supposed to see these lives. I'm pretty sure that there are kids in Chicago, New York, and Seattle whose lives aren't unlike those of these children in Bucharest. Maybe you and I step over them in the Subway without noticing. Maybe we see those eyes in the face of a young stranger and resolve not to do anything about it. Of course, not all good intention has good consequence. The film is also a critique of charities and social services that can be woefully inept at meeting the childrens' needs. Good individuals are undermined by flawed bureaucracy.
Children Underground does not raise complex problems and placate the viewer with simple answers. One wishes the hardware store would stop selling the kids paint to snuff until they drool and spasm. One wishes the state would stop trying to place kids back in homes that they identify as abusive. One wishes that birth control was affirmed as a human right. Belzberg gives a glimpse of the human condition that undermines the way in which American culture relates to the body through commodity and desire. Like the best cinema, the subtext for the audience makes the main text profound.
Movie Review: A heartbreaking story that needs to be told
Summary: 5 Stars
This powerful look at the utterly desolate lives of small band of Romanian street kids can be taken at face value as a condemnation of the policies of a brutal dictator. But it also speaks volumes about the realities of parents forced (by the Romanian government, in this case) to have unwanted children. The film can be divided into three acts. The first unflinchingly examines the children's daily lives in a subway station, begging for food, money, and water, and sniffing paint. The only upbeat aspect is the occasional joy that the children find in ordinary, childlike play-wading in a pond or playing tag. The second part reveals the dysfunctional families from which the children have either run away or been sent away. In one case, we learn that one of the boys is escaping an abusive father. He misses his sister but is too afraid of his father to even go near the house when a social worker tries to take him there. In another family, the mother has obviously shunned her son and daughter at the behest of her new husband. For me, the most heartbreaking scenes occurs here: A charity worker takes them home to see if the parents will take the children back, but the mother and step-father rationalize the kids' life on the streets; they can make more money there, they say. Then even this facade crumbles as it becomes obvious that the parents simply don't want the kids in their lives. The third part revisits the group after a gap of one year. We see that many of the younger kids have been taken up by charity organizations (which see them as having the best chance for rehabilitation), whereas the ending is not so happy for the older kids. This is a deeply saddening film but a must-see look at the misery created by a heartless government and irresponsible, thoughtless parents. This film and each of the children in it will stay with you forever. --MellowMonk.comMovie Review: Take this journey... harrow your soul.
Summary: 5 Stars
Having just seen the DVD of Children Underground I must say strongly that this film should be seen by everyone in the postmodern first world. I saw these things for myself in Romania during December of 2000. The apathy on the streets of Bucharest was deep and dark. My friends there kept shrugging their shoulders saying; "What can you do?" A documentary on the thousands of dogs on the streets would be a riveting nightmare in itself. While I was there they held an election. The choice of presidential candidates was reduced to a hard-line old school communist and a new school fascist. The Communist won. People shrugged. The train stations and subway entrances were indeed hives for feral children. Im deeply grateful to Edet Belzberg for having the courage to descend into this manmade hell to bring these images back. It is my hope that the Romanians themselves find some of that same courage. I was moved that even at this stage of hell several of the kids held on to at least some idea of God. That could be seen by the cynically ironic of the West as the superstition of the hopeless, but perhaps it is also evidence that these children are not hopeless. To blame these problems on the lack of abortions or contraceptives is naïve and simplistic. Listen to the voices of the parents in this film. It is the apathy, the failure of courage and the utter selfishness reinforced by too many years of soul crushing communist dictatorship. We, ourselves, have no reason to gloat. Apart from having a surfeit of material possessions would we fare any better if the props were kicked from beneath us? Perhaps perhaps not. This film, along with Lilja 4-Ever, is a warning sign of something growing in this world. Robert L. Kaplan termed it The Coming Anarchy. It will spread. Meanwhile how will you respond to these things? With compassion or with apathy?Movie Review: Brilliant documentary
Summary: 5 Stars
An unflinching look at children living on the margins of society. Children Underground does not sermonize, moralize, or attempt to resolve the issues that have contributed to what is apparently a pervasive problem in Romania. That is the brilliance of this film; it takes us into the world of these children and allows us to get a glimpse of the individual. Each person will come away with something different, because we are not told how to feel about what we are seeing and the children are not rescued. It is not a story of hardship and redemption. The film makers have made the hard choice not to step into the story, but are observers. The children tell their own story. It is disturbing to see children so young literally fighting for their daily survival. It was fascinating to come to know the individual traits of each child, to see the humanity in these "feral" children, and to witness the resiliency of the human spirit. The children are survivors, and while some argue that they have been so damaged by life on the street and lack of nurturing attachments that they are not able to be "rehabilitated". In witnessing the inherent humanity of each child, it is clear that they have evolved or adapted, in order to survive. This film reminded me of "Streetwise", which depicted Seattle street kids circa 1984. Another great movie that doesn't seek to frame the subject in any context other than letting the characters tell their own story.Movie Review: why we need birth control...
Summary: 5 Stars
i think this movie, although depressing, was a good example of the survival instinct manifested in children. Maybe in some sort of perverted way i thought that these children would become expert in the ways of survival, and that this experience could be a positive in their lives as they got older. These kids were being knoked around early in life and this, hopefully, would only make them stronger granting them a true picture of reality and the dog eat dog lifestyle of capitalism. These kids are a model for the capitalist system that encourages a rugged darwinian individualism. A part of me wishes that I would have spent a few years on the street like these kids (sans the Aurolac if possible). If anything we should admire these children for their incredible innocent strength...this is urban primitivism and liberty at its best especially when contrasted with those fat and ugly pampered Bucharetians chillin' at Sydney's cafe...