Children Underground

This documentary films a group of homeless children who congregate in and around Piața Victoriei subway station. Former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu outlawed contraception and abortion. Children from orphanages and unwanted runaways gather in Bucharest numbering around 20,000. The kids beg for money, fight and struggle to survive while sniffing paint to keep the pain away. In the end, many of these early teens are reunited with their families.

The first half of this documentary is shocking to say the least. It's so unreal that I wonder at times whether this is a fake doc like 'Kids'. The most shocking thing is that those kids are so young. It's a modern-day Dickensian world. The movie does leave some question marks about the future of these kids and it would be awesome to reconnect with these kids in a future date.

This film shows the daily routine of a group of homeless Romanian children living in a train station. Anyone who has ever seen or read about the homeless knows how depressing it is, and seeing children in this state of affairs only heightens it. The children here are addicted to Aurolac paint, which they inhale to get high. While the subject matter couldn't be any more depressing, Children Underground is very well made and holds one's attention.

Whenever people ask me for some recommendations, I always bring this one up. I’ve seen many depressing films in my life, but this has to be one of the worst. It’s hard to imagine what it must be like to be one of those children living as they do. The paint sniffing, the lack of food and the fighting at their age is just sad. I found myself forgetting the ages of these children, but after finishing the film the pictures of some of the children have yet to leave my head months later. There are films like KIDS or Pixote that do their best in trying to portray a day in the life of a youth in their environment. This film is a step inside their lives, as even upon a child being gang beat, the camera did not interfere. The image of the child being beaten by a group of other children is vivid in my head today, and should be. This film was meant to over the eyes of people, and I guarantee it will to anyone who gives it a chance too.

Though it tells a sad story of a small group of runaway children living in squalor, the courage and survival instincts of some of these kids is inspiring. The filmmakers, to their credit, avoid preaching or commentary and there is (thankfully) no narration nor much incidental music to manipulate the viewer's emotional response, as so many lesser documentaries try to do. The DVD contains helpful follow-ups telling where the kids were at after the filming was done. Some of their stories are sad, others hopeful. The documentary doesn't create phony drama with "heroes" and "villains," it doesn't condemn or point fingers at parents or society but lets the audience make up its own mind, and hopefully some viewers will be inspired by this film to make a difference about troubled kids in their own communities.

This is a very powerful documentary of the lives of children in Romania in the late 1990's living in a subway station. By careful filming and concentrating on five children ranging in age from 8 to 15, and by using mostly their own words and interactions, the stark realities of their survival are allowed to show themselves rather than being extracted by force. The follow-up material at the end of the film as well as in the supplements on the DVD are as significant for the effect on the viewer as the body of the documentary. Although the home conditions from which these young people fled are repugnant to our sensibilities, it's clear there is more to their endurance of street life than that. When one boy is asked what he likes best about living in the streets, he thinks a moment and then shouts, "I get to live FREE!" and does a little dance to illustrate. How sad that children should have to sacrifice such basic amenities as health care and education to get a little control over their own lives. In an interview, the film-maker confesses that the most difficult task of all was not intervening as these small people were beaten and insulted, and as they remained perpetually intoxicated on volatile solvents. I agree with the choice. Intervention in the immediate term would not have altered the course of any of their lives, and the impact of the film would have been destroyed. I hope that BOTH lessons here are not lost on the audience -- not only what privations follow a society's collapse, but also what children and ALL humans are willing to suffer in order to gain some personal autonomy.