Children Underground (2000)
Directed by Edet Belzberg

If there's a hell on earth, Children Underground has found it. This bleak, sobering, heartbreaking documentary follows five homeless children living in a subway in Bucharest, Romania, scraping by in the most harrowing form of "freedom" imaginable. They beg and steal for food and, more so, for paint to huff, spending their days getting high as often as they can, and bedding down on greasy cardboard cartons.

The kids, aged 8 to 16, have the tough bearing of street-smart adults, until one of them starts to cry, and you're immediately reminded that they're just kids. The footage is easy to tune out, simply for its sheer, unpleasant hard-knock reality, which is no fun at all to watch. But the moments when the kids break down and become children again, if only for an instant (and usually because they are in pain), bring things straight into the heart.

Seeing a 10-year-old girl huffing paint is brutal—seeing the same girl get beaten up by a gang of older kids is terrifying. You want the director to step in and help her, instead of simply letting the cameras roll, even though you know that it's the reality of this world that needs to be shown in its fullest power if anything's going to change.

Social workers and child advocates make attempts throughout the film to get these kids through official channels to shelter and school, but the attempts fail … there are just too many kids in this situation, and too few resources. The film even tracks down the kids' estranged families in an attempt to understand how these babies end up on the street. Most of the parents see it as the kids' choice. The level of adult responsibility forced upon the kids will make you feel infinitely better about your own harrowing childhood, no matter how bad it was for you.

It's the saddest thing I've ever seen, including my own upbringing. Suddenly all my complaints about my stifling day job seem entirely hollow.

Review by La Fée