A Story of Hope and Horror on Romania's StreetsNancy Ramsey. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Jun 30, 2002. pg. 2.25Abstract (Summary) On her first trip, Ms. [Edet Belzberg] visited children in day clinics and scoured abandoned buildings, street corners and subway stations. The following spring she returned, with financing from the Soros Foundation. A day before her cameraman, Wolfgang Held, arrived from New York, she met a blonde girl named Ana, 10, at a day clinic. Ana introduced Ms. Belzberg to her brother, Marian, 8; both lived in Piata Victoriei among a group of children led by Christina, a 16-year-old girl who shaved her head, dressed as a boy and made money by unloading sodas for kiosk operators. Ana was more or less second in command. ''Ana was cunning and street-smart, but childlike,'' Ms. Belzberg said. ''She always wanted to hold someone's hand. When she would smile or laugh, her laughter was like that of a child anywhere, it wasn't weighted by anything.''Yet on the street ''there were often three or four crises happening at one time,'' said Mr. Held, who contracted tuberculosis while in Bucharest (Ms. Belzberg got lice and scabies). Added Ms. Belzberg, ''Everything is a moment away from igniting.'' Although the crew would step in before a child was seriously hurt -- in the film we see the translator grab [Mihai] as he cuts himself -- they refrained in most cases. Those sequences, when a moment ignites, when a child is beaten, are the most painful to watch, and Ms. Belzberg has been questioned at festivals about her decision not to intervene.Ms. Belzberg has returned to Romania three times since 1998 -- twice in 1999 (sequences shot then became the film's epilogue) and once in the summer of 2001. ''That summer, you didn't see paint stains on the children, but needle marks,'' she said. ''And girls were pregnant. Now you see families living on the street.'' Christina was using heroin; she now has a baby. The word on the street was that Ana was pregnant and prostituting herself; Ms. Belzberg couldn't find her and never learned if the reports were true, though she recently received a photograph of Ana with her mother and her mother's new twins. Marian is in a residential home. Mihai has been in and out of homes, but is now on the street. Macarena -- who when she met Ms. Belzberg in 1998 had said, ''Please show people what is happening here'' -- is still on the streets, getting high on Aurolac. »  Jump to indexing (document details)Full Text (1431  words)Copyright New York Times Company Jun 30, 2002

THROUGHOUT the summer of 1999, in a quiet 11th-floor editing room in Manhattan, Edet Belzberg and Jonathan Oppenheim -- director and editor of ''Children Underground,'' a documentary about street children in Romania -- sorted through 100 hours of video Ms. Belzberg had shot in Bucharest. It reflected the chaos and horror in the lives of a handful of children living together in the center of the city.Mr. Oppenheim watched as children mutilated themselves, slashing their arms with broken glass, out of desperation or anger; he watched as they were beaten by shopkeepers; he watched as a beautiful girl with large, vulnerable eyes sniffed Aurolac, a metallic paint, from a bag.

''What Edet first showed me was so horrifying, so raw, so alien and so unremitting, I didn't think there was a film there,'' Mr. Oppenheim said. ''How do you tell a story about people who are only involved in meeting their primitive, basic needs on the street? But after about 10 hours of footage, the doors of their individual lives opened.''What emerged in ''Children Underground,'' which was nominated for an Academy Award this year and will be shown on Cinemax on July 9, was the story of five children, ages 8 to 16. Their beds were flattened-out cardboard boxes, their home a subway station whose name, Piata Victoriei, or Victory Square, provided a grim, sardonic commentary on Romanian society following the end of the brutal regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed in 1989. To increase the country's work force, Ceausescu had outlawed contraception and abortion, with the result that thousands of unwanted children were put in crude state-run orphanages, from which many fled. In the 90's, as the economy collapsed, poverty, abuse, neglect and alcoholism sent a second wave of children onto the streets, fleeing their families.''I wanted the film to show what a struggle the children's daily lives are -- to get up, to get food, to be safe for a few hours,'' Ms. Belzberg said a few weeks ago, taking a break from work on a new documentary about three female American gymnasts preparing for the 2000 Olympics. ''I wanted to show the horror and the moments of hope, the moments when the children could have been helped.''Ms. Belzberg, who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, has shoulder-length brown hair, dresses simply but elegantly in black or grey and, at 32, conveys enough youthfulness that it's not hard to understand why a street child in Bucharest once asked her where she slept. She first went to Romania in 1997, after earning a master's degree from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and reading an article about street children. She decided to address the subject in film, and called several agencies, including Childhope International, which provides help to organizations working with street children. Marilyn Rocky, Childhope's executive director, supplied her with contacts in Romania.''There had been stories about the orphanages, but the issue of street children was just emerging,'' said Ms. Rocky, who estimates that Bucharest today has up to 3,000 children living on the street and up to 10,000 who work on the street but go home at night.On her first trip, Ms. Belzberg visited children in day clinics and scoured abandoned buildings, street corners and subway stations. The following spring she returned, with financing from the Soros Foundation. A day before her cameraman, Wolfgang Held, arrived from New York, she met a blonde girl named Ana, 10, at a day clinic. Ana introduced Ms. Belzberg to her brother, Marian, 8; both lived in Piata Victoriei among a group of children led by Christina, a 16-year-old girl who shaved her head, dressed as a boy and made money by unloading sodas for kiosk operators. Ana was more or less second in command. ''Ana was cunning and street-smart, but childlike,'' Ms. Belzberg said. ''She always wanted to hold someone's hand. When she would smile or laugh, her laughter was like that of a child anywhere, it wasn't weighted by anything.''There were children living in subway stations all over the city, but part of what made this group approachable, Mr. Held said, was the fact that ''it was run by girls and was less violent. Once you got into the territory of prostitution and harder drugs, kids had knives, and now I'm sure they have guns.''For Ms. Belzberg, the children at Piata Victoriei had ''this undying spirit.'' She and Mr. Held spent six weeks filming -- a typical day began at 9:30 a.m. and ended at 2 or 3 the next morning -- trying to capture that spirit, and the horrors, on tape.In addition to Christina, Ana and Marian, the documentary focuses on Macarena, 14, and Mihai, 12. Macarena, who like Christina grew up in an orphange, introduces herself by explaining the origins of her name: ''In the streets and in the orphanage . . . I dance too much

to the Macarena. I am the most street child. The most Aurolac kid. If I get one bottle, I'm no longer hungry. It's like paradise.''Mihai liked poetry and science, didn't inhale Aurolac and tried to attend school regularly. His father once chained him to the radiator to prevent his running away. ''I want good to happen to me, not evil,'' he says.Ana, Marian and Mihai were part of the second wave of children living on the streets of Bucharest, those who had run away from families hit by the economy's collapse in the early 90's. ''The children feel it's safer on the streets, that they have more control over their lives,'' said Sheldon Levy, a clinical psychologist at Brown University's medical school, who has worked with Childhope. ''Bad things have happened to them within four walls.''Yet on the street ''there were often three or four crises happening at one time,'' said Mr. Held, who contracted tuberculosis while in Bucharest (Ms. Belzberg got lice and scabies). Added Ms. Belzberg, ''Everything is a moment away from igniting.'' Although the crew would step in before a child was seriously hurt -- in the film we see the translator grab Mihai as he cuts himself -- they refrained in most cases. Those sequences, when a moment ignites, when a child is beaten, are the most painful to watch, and Ms. Belzberg has been questioned at festivals about her decision not to intervene.''The film is a fraction of what these children endure,'' she said. ''They have been abandoned by their parents, ignored by society. If I intervened one time, 10 times, a hundred times, it would have made very little difference. My greatest power was to show what was happening to them, to have people see them as individuals, not as subhuman or as animals, which is how they were treated. I remember that after a man beat Macarena, I said to Wolfgang, 'Get his face on camera.' ''Mostly, the film has drawn praise. In addition to the Oscar nomination, it won the special jury prize for documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival last year, and it has been shown at many other festivals.Ms. Belzberg has returned to Romania three times since 1998 -- twice in 1999 (sequences shot then became the film's epilogue) and once in the summer of 2001. ''That summer, you didn't see paint stains on the children, but needle marks,'' she said. ''And girls were pregnant. Now you see families living on the street.'' Christina was using heroin; she now has a baby. The word on the street was that Ana was pregnant and prostituting herself; Ms. Belzberg couldn't find her and never learned if the reports were true, though she recently received a photograph of Ana with her mother and her mother's new twins. Marian is in a residential home. Mihai has been in and out of homes, but is now on the street. Macarena -- who when she met Ms. Belzberg in 1998 had said, ''Please show people what is happening here'' -- is still on the streets, getting high on Aurolac.''I think what you see in the film are the best years of the children's lives,'' Ms. Belzberg said. ''The children were still innocent. They still had hope. Their feeling was, tomorrow we could go to the park. Tomorrow we could go to the pool. Even though we were beaten three times today, tomorrow might be better.''[Photograph]Edet Belzberg, left, documented the lives of five Romanian street children, including the runaways Marian, 8, and his sister Ana, 10, in ''Children Underground,'' which was nominated for an Academy Award. (Edet Belzberg); (HBO)

Indexing (document details)

Subjects: Television programs,  Documentary films,  Children & youth, Homeless people

Locations: Romania

People: Belzberg, Edet

Author(s): Nancy Ramsey

Document types: Feature

Column Name: Television/Radio

Section: 2

Publication title: New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Jun 30, 2002.  pg. 2.25

Source type: Newspaper

ISSN: 03624331

ProQuest document ID: 130377761

Text Word Count 1431

Document URL: http://proquest .umi .com/pqdweb ?did=130377761 &sid=4 &Fmt=3 &clientId=65092 &RQT=309 &VName=PQD