The Children of Leningradsky

Well I have just finished watching this movie and cant hold my tears. It has shown the plight of the the most vulnerable victims of the post soviet union. These are the children forgotten by their families and the world. They are struggling to survive in the harsh realities of life. They are looked upon everyday but forgotten in the next moment. The most tragic part of the movie was when the beautiful little girl dies. I must strongly recommend this movie to watch. It is hard to watch but we cannot shy away from the realities. The best we can do is to donate as much as we can to the Russian homeless children, the links are in the end of the movie and in website. Lets make a difference in someones life.

This is a warning: Approach this documentary with great care. Depicting the daily miseries of orphans of Moscow who lead lives that we could not imagine even in our worst nightmares, it is horror in its purest state, so heart-wrenching that you will have to make an effort to be able to watch it from start to finish without having to look away. Images that will probably haunt you for a long time, if not forever. God, I can feel my eyes welling up just remembering them... It is unbelievable that these horrors, which seem to be a tale from centuries ago, are allowed to take place every day, not just in this wretched 21st century world, but so close to us rich westerners, in a European city which has never been considered to be in "the third world".

Near the end, one of the characters says something like "God loves everybody, not just the Russians; he even loves the Chechens; but, most of all, he loves the children". It sounds to me like the best advice Mr. Putin could ever receive. And these words of wisdom don't come from a cultivated analyst, they come from an abandoned child who dwells in the streets of the same city he lives in...

Gosh, I'm from Canberra, Australia, too, and I wouldn't want the IMDb international community to think we are all hyper-rational insensitives here, who can't actually comment on a film in terms of the human experience it communicates and the emotions it elicits from us! The only Western viewer who could feel anything other than simply extreme sadness and, yes, guilt at this portrayal of these children's lives would be one unable to face a degree of responsibility for them. How so? By having been part of a political era in the West which only engaged communism and post-communism destructively, so as to create the social debacle that these children are the products of. It WOULD be more comfortable to be unaware of the details of such unfathomable misery on the doorstep of Western Europe, but documentaries like this (and an analogous recent one documenting the lives of homeless children in Bucharest, Romania) deny us such convenience. Its inevitable effect on you, if you still have a conscience, will remind you of the memorable scene in that immortal film, "the Third Man" (1949), with Martins (Joseph Cotten) being driven from the children's hospital by Major Calloway (Trevor Howard). He is speechless, and his face is frozen by the horror and pathos he has just witnessed in the dying children made ill by Harry Lime's tainted blackmarket penicillin. It's interesting how a byword for unadulterated evil and injustice is always the suffering of children. And this documentary is the MORE powerful for being brief and not getting lost in the commentary and analysis that get away from the essence of the agony portrayed. Go live the horror of these innocent lives as if yours was one of them, experience just how far in fact away from theirs is yours and that of everyone you know, and try then to say these 35 minutes didn't change your life a bit.

It's hard to tell exactly how to approach this documentary. Even at face value it is hard to judge how honest this portrayal is and, particularly, how this small group of delinquents fits into a bigger picture. Even the most minimalist narrative could has solved this later problem, but all we are given are connivingly edited snippets of interviews with the children depicted. I would honestly be surprised if you could not find a similar sample of abused white trash street kids with similar lives in many western cities. I don't doubt that the problem is more prevalent in many of the economically collapsed Eastern European nations, but The Children of Leningradsky totally failed to illustrate this.

I find it very hard to see this documentary as anything but exploitative. The tragic events the documentary follows are depicted in a very one-sided manner and are edited in a way that seems purely designed to shock the middle class and further the careers of the film makers. I was more horrified that the filmmakers had the audacity to cash in on these kids than I was by the events themselves. Schlock documentary making at its worst.

All the marks I can give this are purely because I believe the schlock angle may scare some of the mediocre set to act on child poverty.