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Children Underground
Film Documenting Romanian Street Kids Nominated for an Oscar
 Listen as Korva Coleman speaks with Edet Belzberg about Children Underground.
 Watch an excerpt from the film Children Underground.
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Street children wait at dusk at entrace to a subway station.
Still image from Children Underground courtesy HBO
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March 2, 2002 -- Beneath the streets of Bucharest, thousands of Romanian children sleep on cardboard beds, beg for food and water and sniff toxic paint fumes to forget their troubles. They are the discarded legacy of the fall of a Communist regime -- and the focus of an Oscar-nominated documentary film, Children Underground.
Former Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu outlawed abortion and contraception and ordered women to bear as many children as possible in his failed effort to increase the Romanian workforce. He was executed on Christmas Day, 1989, but today Romanians live with the fallout from that edict -- and as the film shows, the children are mostly ignored.
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16-year-old Cristina: "The fist is all that matters."
Still image from Children Underground courtesy HBO
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The film does not shy from documenting scenes of utter destitution and self-abuse. Some of the children spend every waking moment in a drug-addled daze, "huffing" an industrial paint called Aurolac to get high. Their faces are smeared with a sparkling, shimmering, silvery poison. Another scene shows a shopkeeper beating a teenager. Onlookers decline to come to the girl's aid.
An estimated 20,000 children live on the streets of Bucharest, Romania's capital and largest city, many finding shelter at night in subway stations. Not all of them are orphans -- some are runaways, escaping poverty or abusive parents, often both.
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A homeless child "huffing" toxic silver paint.
Still image from Children Underground courtesy HBO
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Filmmaker Edet Belzberg spent more than a year recording the lives of five Romanian street kids:
Mihai, 12; 8-year-old Marian; Ana, 10; 14-year-old Macarena (a nickname she earned for the dance she's fond of); and Cristina, who at 16 is the street-smart and sometimes brutal leader of a pack of street kids. She dodges sexual abuse and gains respect by cropping her hair and passing as male.
Children Underground, Belzberg's first film, gets its title from where the children sleep at night, a Bucharest subway station. Belzberg's work won a special jury prize at last year's Sundance Film Festival.
 Browse more NPR stories on Romania.
Other Resources
• Oscar.com is the official Web site of the 74th annual Academy Awards.
• Sundance Film Festival.
• HBO.
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