ABSTRACT
Edet Belzberg's Children Underground documents a post-communism horror story. But this full-length documentary follows a narrative of environmental adaptation that also reveals the negative effects of cultural and environmental disasters. As in Dark Days, which records the lives of several "homeless" adults living in subway tunnels underneath New York City, Children Underground documents the lives of five homeless children who enter a domesticated underground. Children Underground presents an ethnographic reading of certain homeless children in the Budapest subways, using film as Belzberg's tool. Described as cinema verite, Children Underground draws on a variety of documentary forms and styles, including direct cinema and portraiture. The narrative of Children Underground follows four loosely structured acts. They include: going underground and introducing the five children of focus in the film; living like a family in the relative bliss below the savage city; interacting with outsiders who halfheartedly try to help them; and after police force them to leave, climbing back above ground.
