CAP Welcome & Film Event: Fall 2007
Raw.
Brutal.
Heart-wrenching.
A look inside the lives of five homeless Romanian street children.
Join the Child Advocacy Program (CAP) at Harvard Law School for this gripping film event:
Children Underground
Wed., Sept. 26, 2007
5:00 PM
Pound Hall, Room 102
Harvard Law School5:00 – 6:00 PM:
HLS Professor of Law and CAP Faculty Director Elizabeth Bartholet will provide welcome remarks. You will also hear about the unique Child Advocacy Program at HLS from Prof. Bartholet and Lecturer on Law Jessica Budnitz. The film screening will follow.
6:00 - 7:00 PM:
You'll have the opportunity to discuss the documentary with the brave, fiercely determined filmmaker, Edet Belzberg, who opened the world’s eyes to the aftermath of Nicolae Ceausescu’s oppressive regime that banned contraception. Among other awards, Edet was nominated for an Oscar for her work and received the coveted MacArthur “Genius” Award in 2005.
Prof. Bartholet will also be available after the screening to discuss the human rights implications of the film, including the role of international adoption in child welfare.
Snacks will be served.
Click here to RSVP: <http://tinyurl.com/yozln7>
What Others are Saying About this Dramatic Film & Filmmaker:
This modern tale ventures below the streets of Bucharest, Romania, to introduce us to five members of a "family" of orphaned, abandoned, or runaway children living in the Piata Victoriei subway station. The children beg and steal to buy food and Aurolac, which they sniff to get high. The intimate, cinema vérité style allows the children to speak for themselves with striking naturalness, revealing both the horrific conditions of their existence and their uninhibited, distinctive personalities. Cristina uses her rough boyish look and physical size to enforce her position as ringleader of the group. Mihai, the most reflective, regrets having left his mother and sister to the whims of his violent father and dreams of a conventional life and family. Ana fled terrible poverty and assumes a motherly role toward Marian, her young brother. Finally, Macarena has lost nearly all sense of herself after four mind-numbing years of homelessness. In this tough film, reminiscent of black-and-white reportage of the depression, first-time director Edet Belzberg, with a style that is immediate, candid, brutal, and deeply humanistic, tells a riveting, cruel tale of children in Romania at the turn of this millennium. It reflects the larger problem of youth homelessness in the world, children with highly developed skills of survival who are "addicted to the life of the street." -- See: http://www.hrw.org/iff-00/children.html
To View the Children Underground Trailer:
Click here for the provocative trailer & NPR interview with the filmmaker:
Images from the Film:
Sixteen-year-old Cristina is the savvy, yet domineering, leader of a young pack of street children, desparate to survive beneath the streets of Bucharest.
Even in the midst of the brutual underground subway lines of the city, the older children show compassion for the younger ones.
At only fourteen, Macarena has already learned how to escape her daily struggles by "huffing" an industrial paint called Aurolac to get high.
Twelve-year-old Mihai, who left an abusive family for the streets, becomes so desparate that he engages in self-mutilating behavior after he and the others in his pack get lost in a park.
"Children Underground" Filmmaker Edet Belzberg:
Edet Belzberg is a documentary filmmaker whose films are distinguished by her choice of subjects, in-depth treatment of time and place, and elegant storytelling. In Belzberg's signature film, Children Underground, she follows and films a group of homeless children living in a train station in Bucharest, Romania. Raw, graceful, and insightful, Children Underground personalizes the often dangerous and always chaotic and uncertain world of youngsters casually abandoned by their families and the larger society. Overcoming the obstacles of language, culture, and place, she records the individual and collective daily struggles of the five main characters with an unflinching, compassionate eye, managing at the same time to win the trust of children whose capacity for trust is all but depleted. Critically-acclaimed throughout the U.S. and Europe, the film has focused international attention on the social and institutional disregard of child welfare in post-communist Romania. Edet received a B.A. (1991) from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and an M.A. (1997) from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. She has been a frequent lecturer at Columbia's School of Journalism and has taught at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts (2001). She is a 2005 MacArthur Fellow.
To Contact CAP:
cap@law.harvard.edu
617-496-1684