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| Title of Film | Director(s) Location Release Date Run Time | Children: Poverty, Violence, Health, & Children’s Rights Brief Synopsis |
| Life III: Danger Children at Work | Emily Marlow 2003 Guatemala 27 minutes | Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in Central America; most Guatemalans exist on subsistence farming. But in the San Juan Sacatepequez region, where the land is poor, many have turned to producing fireworks at home. The practice has become the major source of income for 80% of the local people. It is a labor intensive process, and children often start working at the task by the age of six. There are no guarantees on how much families are paid for their labor, and no safety controls. Accidents are frequent. Many are fatal. This LIFE installment looks at campaigns to persuade local people to consider safer ways of earning a living - ways that can also allow their children to go to school and gain the education necessary for sustainable development. With the support of the International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor of the International Labor Organization; the European Commission Directorate General for Development to promote better understanding of development issues; the Directorate General for the Environment |
| Sowing Seeds of Hunger (Life III Series) | James Heer 2003 Zambia, Africa 27 minutes | The AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa has crippled the agricultural community while forcing children to undertake the responsibilities of farming. Barnabas and Mary Chalaba were once among the more prosperous farmers of their village in the north of Zambia. But today, they are destitute - too sick to farm their land, and dependent on their children to oversee the crops. Like 30 million others in sub-Saharan Africa, Mary and Barnabas are infected with the HIV virus. In southern Africa, the highest rates of HIV infection occur among young adults, whose ages range from 15 to 49. This is the same group who, as agricultural workers and small scale farmers, are the backbone and future of countries such as Zambia. Since 1985, more than seven million farmers have succumbed to AIDS, striking at the heart of agricultural production. The fallout from this pandemic extends beyond agriculture, undermining development in the region while endangering the lives of orphans and widows affected by the rampant spread of HIV. |
| Beijing Features: Rights Of Passage: Four Stories Of Survival | Diane Best 1995 Burkina Faso, India, Jamaica, Nicaragua 27 minutes | Tells the stories of four teenage girls coming-of-age in four very different communities—and the personal cost of this transition to adulthood for each of them. In the pressurized environment of shanty-town life in Nicaragua, Aleyda is addicted to glue-sniffing and is gradually slipping into a life of prostitution. In India, Tarranum - like so many girl children - has already been taken out of full-time education and is waiting to be married off by her parents. In Jamaica, Natalyn is 14 years old and seven months pregnant. While finally in Burkina Faso, Adjara faces the prospect of female genital mutilation - a tradition that the local women see as essential if women are to enter into marriage. |
| From Rhetoric to Reality: Broadcasting for Change: Sex With the Angels | Joan Salvat 2000 Dominican Republic 14 minutes | Tourism to the paradise island of the Dominican Republic is increasing. So are the numbers of local girls selling sex for tourist dollars. It is estimated that in the Dominican Republic, which has a population of about seven million, there are 25,000 minors working as prostitutes. Using a hidden camera "Sex With the Angels" captures life on the streets - hotel workers offering to arrange sex with child prostitutes, tourists negotiating prices and the police cracking down on the trade and demanding bribes. Two young girls talk about their experiences, needs and choices and lead the film-makers to examine the organizations who are working in the slums to support vulnerable minors and provide alternative opportunities. The 32 part series, 'From Rhetoric to Reality', is available on five tapes. Tape 2 includes 'Sex With Angels' and can be bought separately. |
| Pretty Baby | Cassandra McGrogan United Kingdom 11 minutes | Teenage mothers in Scotland in the UK, which has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe, are trying to secure their children's futures by returning to school. But it's not always possible to look to the future when you're struggling in the present. Three intimate interviews with girls in Edinburgh show how people treated them when they became pregnant, how they felt about themselves and what being a young mother has taught them. |
| Developing Stories I: Life And Debt | Octavio Bezerra 1992 Brazil 47 minutes | A van grinds to a halt on wasteland in Rio de Janeiro. Masked gunmen drag a handful of teenagers from the vehicle, stand them against a wall and shoot them. It’s a gruesome scene repeated every day in cities throughout Brazil. In Rio alone, over 500 street children are assassinated every year. Their crime? They are poor and have nowhere else to go. The plight of street children is not a new one. It results from the same pressures, argues Octavio Bezerra in his compelling docu-drama, that have led to widespread exploitation of the Amazon rainforest. Ultimately, they derive from Brazil’s massive external debt and the raft of problems it generates: impoverishment and environmental degradation, cut-backs in health and education, rampant inflation, family breakdown, soaring crime and endemic corruption. |
| Stolen Childhoods | Len Morris Robin Romano Sumatra, Mexico, & Kenya 2005 Feature Length | The film features stories of child laborers around the world, told in their own words. Children are shown working in dumps, quarries, brick kilns. One boy has been pressed into forced labor on a fishing platform in the Sea of Sumatra, a fifteen-year-old runaway describes being forced into prostitution on the streets of Mexico City, while a nine-year-old girl picks coffee in Kenya to help her family survive. The film places these children's stories in the broader context of the worldwide struggle against child labor. Stolen Childhoods provides an understanding of the causes of child labor, what it costs the global community, how it contributes to global insecurity and what it will take to eliminate it. The film shows best practice programs that remove children from work and put them in school, so that they have a chance to develop as children and also have a chance of making a reasonable living when they grow up. Stolen Childhoods challenges the viewer to help break the cycle of poverty for the 246 million children laboring at the bottom of the global economy. |
| Children Underground | Edet Belzberg Romania 2003 104 minutes | Makers of documentary went to live with parentless children in Bukharest underground. Movie shows number of lost children struggling through everyday life full of violence, illness, petty crime, and inhaling glue or paint. |
| Children of Leningradsky | Andrzej Celinski Hanna Polak Russia 2005 35 minutes | Since the fall of the Iron Curtain an estimated four million children have found themselves living on the streets in the former countries of the Soviet Union. In the streets of Moscow alone there are over 30,000 surviving in this manner at the present time. The makers of the documentary film concentrated on a community of homeless children living hand to mouth in the Moscow train station Leningradsky. Eight-year-old Sasha, eleven-year-old Kristina, thirteen-year-old Misha and ten-year-old Andrej all dream of living in a communal home. They spend winter nights trying to stay warm by huddling together on hot water pipes and most of their days are spent begging. Andrej has found himself here because of disagreements with his family. Kristina was driven into this way of life by the hatred of her stepmother and twelve-year-old Roma by the regular beatings he received from his constantly drunk father. "When it is worst, we try to make money for food by prostitution," admits thirteen-year-old Artur. The pair of Polish filmmakers in this raw and very effective documentary even succeeded in filming an incident where the police patrol beat one of the street children and smear an entire tube of glue into his hair and onto his face. It is precisely this sniffing of the glue fumes that gives these children the possibility to at least for a little while escape the unforgiving world around them. It is a life of fleeting possibilities and danger. |
| Salaam Bombay | Mira Nair India 1998 113 minutes | Fed-up of being continuously bullied by his elder brother, Krishna sets fire to his motor-bike, and this gets him into big trouble with his mother. She takes him to the nearby Apollo Circus, and tells him that he can only come home after he earns Rs.500/- to pay for the damaged bike. Krishna agrees to do so and finds employment with the circus. One day the Circus Boss asks him to run an errand, and when Krishna returns back he finds that the circus has packed up and traveled elsewhere. Alone, with nowhere to turn to, and unable to find Rs.500 to repay his mother, he decides to travel to the nearest big city - which is Bombay. Upon his arrival in Bombay, he is robbed of all his meager possessions. He follows the thieves, and befriends them. He ends up in Bombay's notorious red-light area of Falkland Road near Grant Road Railway Station. One of the thieves, Chillum, also a drug pusher and addict, helps Krishna get a job with the owner of a tea stall "Grant Road Tea Stall". Krishna's gets a new name "Chaipau", and learns to live with it. His goal is to get the Rs.500 and return home to his mother. Krishna soon finds out that saving money with his surroundings and people near him is next to impossible. To make matters worse, he has a crush on a young prostitute, Sola Saal, he sets fire to her room and attempts to elope with her - in vain. This gets him a severe beating, and he also loses his job. He works odd jobs to feed himself, and look after Chillum, who cannot live without his drugs. He and his pals also rob an elderly Parsi man of his belongings by breaking into his house in broad daylight. One night while returning home, he and several of his friends are apprehended by the police, and taken to a juvenile home. But this detention was not to last very long, as Krishna escapes, and goes back to his world - the world of drug-pushers, pimps, prostitutes, and nurture his dream of someday going back to his mother. |
| Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco | Hector Babenco Brazil 1981 128 minutes | Pixote, a 10-year-old runaway boy, is arrested on the streets of Sao Paulo during a police round-up homeless people. Pixote endures torture, degradation and corruption at a local youth detention center where two of the runaways are murdered by policemen who frame Lilica, a 17-year-old transvestite hustler. Pixote helps Lilica and three other boys escape where they make their living by the life of crime which only escalates to more violence and death. |
| Born into Brothels | Zana Briski Ross Kauffman India 2004 85 minutes | Amidst the apparent growing prosperity of India, there is a dark underbelly of poverty of another side of the nation that is little known. This film is a chronicle of filmmakers Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman's efforts to show that world of Calcutta's red light district. To do that, they inspired a special group of children of the prostitutes of the area to photograph the most reluctant subjects of it. As the kids excel in their new found art, the filmmakers struggle to help them have a chance for a better life away from the miserable poverty that threatens to crush their dreams. |
| Sir çocuklari (Children of Secret) | Umit Cin Güven Aydin Sayman Turkey 2002 115 minutes | Ten years old Cemil Halil Ibrahim Aras runs away from his stepfather who tortures him and his mother and ends up in Istanbul. Veli Firat Tanis, the leader of a gang which Cemil takes refuge in Haydarpasa, tries to send him back to his home by putting his pocket money. While the gang gathers money for Cemil, they, at the same time, suffer from harsh living conditions. In the mean time Cemil's mother Münevver Nur Sürer comes to Istanbul in the hope of finding her son. |
| Waiting for Sunrise | Aneel Ahmad Pakistan 2005 6.5 (?) minutes | This documentary is concerned with the extreme poverty, courtesans and prostitution located within the streets of Lahore. Children without parents, they live in slums, cold and unloved, and must beg to stay alive. Undergoing verbal and physical abuse to bring enough money to live each day as it comes. This film is about the underprivileged children of Lahore, Pakistan and child labour; also on how poverty and social class controls their environment. With all these elements brought together, we can observe the people and the lives affected by them. These issues are rarely dealt with on such a personal and emotional level. Lahore with its collection of people becomes another character within this short documentary. The children of Lahore, like us all, have their individual lives and dreams but they are burdened with extreme poverty. Waiting for Sunrise deals with the poor and dispossessed - and really, the poorest of the poor, the lowest of the low in Pakistani urban society. |
| Ali Zaoua | Nabil Ayouch Morocco 2000 90 minutes | Ali, Kwita, Omar and Boubker are street kids. The daily dose of glue sniffing represents their only escape from reality. Since they left Dib and his gang, they have been living on the portside of Casablanca. They live in constant fear of Dib's revenge. Ali wants to become a sailor - when he was living with his mother, a prostitute, he used to listen to a fairy tale about the sailor who discovered the miracle island with two suns. Instead of finding his island in the dream, Ali and his friends are confronted with Dib's gang. Matters are getting serious. |
| Cidade de Deus (City of God) | Fernando Meirelles Kátia Lund Russia 2002 130 minutes | Cidade de Deus (City of God) is a housing project built in the 1960's that--in the early 80's--became one of the most dangerous places in Rio de Janeiro. The tale tells the stories of many characters whose lives sometimes intersect. However, all is seen through the eyes of a singular narrator: Buscapé, a poor black youth too frail and scared to become an outlaw but also too smart to be content with underpaid, menial jobs. He grows up in a very violent environment. The odds are all against him. But Buscapé soon discovers that he can see reality differently than others. His redemption is that he's been given an artist's point of view as a keen-eyed photographer. As Buscapé is not the real protagonist of the film--only the narrator--he is not the one who makes the decisions that will determine the sequence of events. Nevertheless, not only his life is attached to what happens in the story, but it is also through Buscapé's perspective of life that one can understand the complicated layers and humanity of a world, apparently condemned to endless violence. |
| A Kind of Childhood | Tareque Masud Catherine Masud Bangladesh 2007 51 minutes | Six years of a boy's life, who works with a rickshaw driver, and the many issues he struggles to overcome while working in the city, clearly demonstrates that merely offering free education is not enough. http://directcinema.com/dcl/title.php?id=407 |
| Sacrifice | By Ellen Bruno Thailand 1998 90 minutes | The trafficking of Burmese girls into Thailand for prostitution |
| No Time for Play: Working Children in Nicaragua | Nicaragua 2002 30 minutes | This compelling documentary personalizes the global issue of child labour through the life experiences of four Nicaraguan child workers: Elena, working in a garbage dump; Yessenis, a domestic; Luisito, who helps out at the marketplace; and Raquel, who picks coffee beans. These children profiled are just four of many: in Nicaragua, more than 250 million children have to work to support their families. This program vividly documents the problem, and features some of the most effective solutions to help children work less so that they can go to school. Examples of efforts featured include initiatives undertaken by children themselves, and by adult organizations, both governmental and non-governmental, in Canada and Nicaragua. |
| Trilogia das Novas Familias (Trilogy of New Families) | Isabel Loronha | A trilogy of short stories about the lives of children affected by AIDS. |
| Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) | Truffaut France 1959 99 minutes | A young Parisian boy, Antoine Doinel, neglected by his derelict parents, skips school, sneaks into movies, runs away from home, steals things, and tries (disastrously) to return them. Like most kids, he gets into more trouble for things he thinks are right than for his actual trespasses. Unlike most kids, he gets whacked with the big stick. He inhabits a Paris of dingy flats, seedy arcades, abandoned factories, and workaday streets, a city that seems big and full of possibilities only to a child's eye. |
| Children of Tibet: The Exile Generation | Melinda Wearne Tibet 2003 53 minutes | Children of Tibet follows the journey of three young Tibetan refugees who escape by foot across the Tibetan terrain and over the Himalayas in winter. Told in their own words, it is a story of courage and hope, set against the backdrop of the Himalayan Mountains. The journey takes them along a dangerous route - leaving their families behind, they are placed in the care of guides who are entrusted to take them across the mountains. |
| Onibus 174 ( Bus 174) | José Padilha Felipe Lacerda Brazil 2002 150 minutes | A Brazilian documentary about a young man who hijacks a bus in Rio; teach about lives of street children and trace the relationships between structural and other forms of violence. |
| Klovnebarna (The Clown Children ) | Jannicke Systad Jacobsen Karin Beate Nøsterud Guatemala 2005 6 minutes | An ordinary day in the life of two brothers, earning their living by juggling oranges and throwing cartwheels between cars and heavy exhaust at a crossroads in Guatemala City. http://www.nfi.no/english/norwegianfilms/show.html?id=619 |
| Living Rights | Duco Tellegen | A series of documentaries made by a Dutch filmmaker. Each film focuses on a specific child and uses their story to illustrate one of the rights included in the Declaration on the Rights of the Child. Recommended: 'Toti' and 'Yoshi”. http://www.dovanafilms.nl/lr.html |
| The Devil's Miner | Kief Davidson Richard Ladkani Bolivia 2005 82 minutes | About children working in the mines of Bolivia. The story of two bothers who work in silver mines in Bolivia to earn money so that they can continue going to school. http://www.thedevilsminer.com/index_new.html |
| Danger: Children at Work | Cassandra McGrogan United Kingdom 2003 27 minutes | Documentary looking at child labour in agriculture, fast food and the garment industries in the US, with scenes from sweat shops in New York and fast food outlets in Boston, plus agricultural areas of Iowa, California and Florida. |
| We are Not Beggars | Wen-jie Qin China 1997 30 minutes | This documentary depicts the life of several child street performers in a contemporary Chinese city. These children had been wandering the country as street performers for four years and are virtual "untouchables" to most Chinese. The camera follows them in their daily rounds through the streets, performing acrobatic tricks and begging. It captures their daily struggles for survival and their dream to return home and go to school, and looks at how these children face the challenges of a harsh environment with inner strength. Through this program we have a window on a little known aspect of Chinese society today and the realities facing so many of the world's children. |
| The Boys of Baraka | Heidi Ewing Rachel Grady U.S. 2005 84 minutes | The film reveals the human face of a tragic statistic — 61 percent of Baltimore's African-American boys fail to graduate from high school; 50 percent of them go on to jail. Behind those grim figures lie the grimmer realities of streets ruled by drug dealers, families fractured by addiction and prison and a public school system seemingly surrendered to chaos. |
| Children and Family: Refugee Children | ||
| Title of Film | Director(s) Location Release Date Run Time | Brief Synopsis |
| Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea | Margaret Mead Gregory Bateson 1951 Bali, New Guinea 17 minutes | Depicts sibling rivalry among children of the same age in the two cultures of Bali and New Guinea by showing how they respond to the mother attending to another baby, the ear piercing of a younger sibling, and the experimental presentation of a doll. |
| Four Families | Fali Bilimoria, William Novik, John Buss, Richard Gilbert 1959 India, France, Japan and Canada 59 minutes | An on-the-spot comparison of family life in India, France, Japan and Canada. Dr. Margaret Mead discusses how the upbringing of children contributes to a distinctive national character. |
| Angotee: Story of an Eskimo Boy | Douglas Wilkinson Eastern Arctic 1953 31 minutes | The time is 1953 and the place is the eastern Arctic. This film follows the events of a man's growth from birth to maturity. Here we see how an Inuit baby is born, how the young child is treated, how he learns the arts of the hunter, grows to manhood and marries. |
| Still, The Children Are Here | Dinaz Stafford 2004 India 85 minutes | An exquisitely photographed portrait of an indigenous society that has maintained its culture in isolation from a rapidly urbanizing and westernizing India. But this intimate film not only describes an indigenous people and culture, but also speaks to the essential nature of man. For many of the Garos of Meghalaya in North East India, cultivating rice is a way of life and worship. In the West Garo Hills, villagers still grow a diversity of ancient strains of hill rice in the same manner as humanity first did 6000 years ago. These strains are now highly valued by scientists studying sustainable agriculture and botanical genetics. Of Tibetan-Burmese origin, the Garos' homes and just about all of their household goods have their origins in the lush bamboo forests that surround them. Their worries are both basic (having enough food and a roof over their heads) and universal (the women worry about whether their men are faithful and a couple mourns the loss of their child). Theirs is a society based on the natural order of things, but as the world changes around them, they begin to find this is no longer enough. Shot over the course of an entire growing cycle, from the preparation of the fields to the harvest, Still, The Children Are Here is an elegant meditation on a way of life that to outsiders seems simple and peaceful, but is fraught with the same existential questions that plague us all. |
| Debe's Tantrum | John Marshall 1972 Botswana 9 minutes | San parents rarely punish their children, believing it ineffective and a source of public conflict. In this film a five-year-old named Debe refuses to let his mother Di!ai go gathering without him. Di!ai appeals to her daughter N!ai to entertain the child but Debe resists. In the end Di!ai leaves with Debe on her back. This is a companion film to The Wasp Nest which shows Di!ai, Debe, and other women and children on the subsequent gathering expedition. |
| Growing Up I and Growing Up II | Bruno Sorrentino 19993 Brazil, China, Norway, Kenya, India, Latvia, the UK, South Africa, and the U.S. Growing Up I: 60 minutes Growing Up II: 27 minutes | Growing Up I: What does the future hold for the children of the new Millennium? From Brazil to China - in Norway, Kenya, India, Latvia, the UK, South Africa and the US - GROWING UP follows the lives of 11 babies born in the year of the 1992 UN Earth Summit to find out. The first programme in the series introduces audiences to the children, their parents and the environment in which they will grow up. In Northern Kenya, Erdo is the daughter of Turkana herders, Esther and Christopher. But their lives are shattered when raiders steal their cattle, and they are reduced to cutting the few remaining trees in the region to make charcoal to feed their children. In China's Guanghzhou City, baby Leong Yukkay is the first and only child her parents Liang and Zheng will have. Zheng works in a factory manufacturing paper: effluents from the plant pollute the air and the local countryside - but it's typical of China's wholesale drive to develop and catch up with the industrialized north. And in India - where child labour is illegal but often ignored - baby Panjarvanam's older sisters already work in a local match-making factory. Will she escape the same fate? Three years later, the second programme returns to measure the children's progress. Some things have changed for the better. Some haven't changed at all. In South Africa, for instance, where President Mandela's government has replaced the old National Party regime, baby Justin's parents welcome the changes which mean everyone working together for a better country - and even feel relaxed enough to take a holiday. But in nearby Ciskei, where baby Vusumzi lives with her single mother Mavis, conditions are still very much how they were in 1992. And in northern California, a question mark still hangs over the future of baby Stephanie as the exploitation of the last remaining temperate forests continues apace. Throughout the 1990s GROWING UP will pose a continuing challenge to deliver on the promises made at the Rio Earth Summit. Growing Up II: Growing Up, a major international co-production, looked at the prospects for eleven babies born within a year of the Earth Summit; eleven healthy babies with equal abilities born in very unequal parts of the world. Growing Up II is the second installment of what happened to these children and their families |
| Lakposhtha parvaz mikonand (Turtles can Fly) | Bahman Ghobadi Iraq-Turkey 2004 95 minutes | Kurdish children in a refugee camp on the Iraq-Turkish border; children's economic activities and roles in the war economy, gendered outcomes of war on children, children's rights in war situations; children in film are from the refugee camp portrayed, not professional actors, so there are interesting discussion to be had about the filmmaking itself as well. In Kurdish with English subtitles. Allows for the viewer to think and analyze the movie and the happenings in this movie relating to children on issues of agency, children' rights, poverty, children as consumers, etc. This movie does not deal with these issues as explicitly as a documentary would. Instead, you can use it as a way of creating discussion and analyzing various situations and pieces in the movie to further develop discussion on those exact topics that you had mentioned. |
| Everyone's Child | Tsitsi Dangarembga Zimbabwe 1996 90 minutes | Tells the story of a child-headed home in Zimbabwe and how the various children in the family and members of their community try to (or fail to) support their survival and livelihood. A lot on gendered children's survival strategies, and children's rights (protection, education, etc.). It is supposedly the first feature film directed by a black Zimbabwean woman. The ending is really interesting; the movie was funded by international organizations, who wanted a different ending. Dangarembga and the African production crew apparently refused the proposed ending and kept the one included in the movie. In English. |
| Lost Boys of Sudan | Megan Mylan Jon Shenk Sudan, USA 2003 87 minutes | Lost Boys of Sudan is a feature-length documentary that follows two Sudanese refugees on an extraordinary journey from Africa to America. Orphaned as young boys in one of Africa's cruelest civil wars, Peter Dut and Santino Chuor survived lion attacks and militia gunfire to reach a refugee camp in Kenya along with thousands of other children. From there, remarkably, they were chosen to come to America. Safe at last from physical danger and hunger, a world away from home, they find themselves confronted with the abundance and alienation of contemporary American suburbia. |
| Rain in a Dry Land | Anne Makepeace Somalia, USA 2007 82 minutes | Chronicles two years in the lives of two extended Somali Bantu families as they leave behind a two-hundred year legacy of oppression in Africa to face new challenges in a strange new land. The film begins in January, 2004, at the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, where our featured families are stunned by what they learn about America in their "Cultural Orientation" class: refrigerators, stoves, bathtubs, elevators, stairs, buildings taller than one storey, schools, and all the things we take for granted in modern life. As their awe and excitement grow, the audience fears for them. How will these illiterate Muslim farmers who speak no English manage to survive in America? Deals with refugees adjusting to life in the United States, touching on international and immigration aid and policies. |
| God Grew Tired of Us: The Story of Lost Boys of Sudan | Christopher Dillon Quinn Tommy Walker Somalia, U.S. 2006 86 minutes | In 1987, Sudan's Muslim government pronounced death to all males in the Christian south: 27,000 boys fled to Ethiopia on foot. In 1991, they were forced to flee to Kenya; 12,000 survived to live in a U.N. camp in Kakuma. Archival footage documents the 1,000 mile flight; we see life in the camp. We follow three young men who repatriate to the U.S. John Bul Dau goes to Syracuse, and by the film's end, becomes a spokesperson for the Lost Boys and Lost Girls of Sudan; Daniel Abol Pach and Panther Bior go to Pittsburgh. All work several jobs, send money back to the camp, search for relatives lost in the civil war, acclimatize to the U.S., seek an education, and miss their homeland. |
| Benjamin and his Brother | Arthur Howes Sudan 2002 87 minutes | Years of war and ethnic conflict in the Sudan have created a generation of young men, known as the "Lost Boys," who have spent more years in refugee camps than in their home communities. This intimate film recounts the story of Benjamin and William Deng, brothers joined in the struggle of a seemingly never-ending exile, who are then separated when one is accepted into a United States resettlement program while the other remains in a Kenyan refugee camp. It is not only a film about the two brother's dreams and reality, it is also a film about war and suffering in their beloved South Sudan, lost childhood and innocence, the trials of life as a refugee in foreign lands and the existing realities of survival. Real life in the so called "Land of dreams" – America, is not an easy adjustment. |
| Forbidden Games | René Clément France 1952 102 minutes | The film recounts the death of five-year-old Paulette's parents and of her pet dog in a Nazi air attack on a column of refugees fleeing Paris, France during World War II. In the chaos, the traumatized child meets ten-year-old Michel Dollé whose peasant family will take her in. She quickly becomes attached to Michel as her big brother and the two attempt to cope with the death and destruction that surrounds them by secretly building a small cemetery where they bury her dog and then start to bury other animals, stealing crosses from the local graveyard. |
| Central do Brasil (Central Station) | Walter Salles Brazil 1998 113 minutes | Dora, who writes letters for illiterate people at Rio de Janeiro's central railroad station, feels compelled to help 9-year-old Josué locate his estranged father after the child's mother dies in a car accident. As Dora and the boy bond during their journey to Brazil's remote Northeast region, the interplay between them is delightful to watch. |
| Ponette | Jacques Doillon France 1996 97 minutes | When her mother dies in a car accident, 4-year-old Ponette is left physically and emotionally scarred and in the care of her grief-stricken father. Sent to live with family for a while, Ponette sullenly navigates a world made up mostly of children's faces and slowly comes to terms with her loss. |
| Abril Despedaçado | Walter Salles Brazil 2001 105 minutes | The Brazilian badlands, April 1910. Tonho is ordered by his father to avenge the death of his older brother. The young man knows that if he commits this crime, his life will be divided in two: the 20 years he has already lived and the few days he has left to live, before the other family avenges their son's death. He is torn between fulfilling his ancestral duty and rebelling against it, urged by his younger brother Pacu. That's when a tiny traveling circus passes through the vast badlands where Tonho's family lives. |
| Title of Film | Director(s) Location Release Date Run Time | Children as Consumers Brief Synopsis |
| Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood | Adriana Barbaro Jeremy Earp U.S. 2008 67 minutes | Consuming Kids throws desperately needed light on the practices of a relentless multi-billion dollar marketing machine that now sells kids and their parents everything from junk food and violent video games to bogus educational products and the family car. Drawing on the insights of health care professionals, children's advocates, and industry insiders, the film focuses on the explosive growth of child marketing in the wake of deregulation, showing how youth marketers have used the latest advances in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to transform American children into one of the most powerful and profitable consumer demographics in the world. Consuming Kids pushes back against the wholesale commercialization of childhood, raising urgent questions about the ethics of children's marketing and its impact on the health and well-being of kids. |
| Mickey Mouse Monopoly | Miguel Picker U.S. 2001 52 minutes | The Disney Company's massive success in the 20th century is based on creating an image of innocence, magic and fun. Its animated films in particular are almost universally lauded as wholesome family entertainment, enjoying massive popularity among children and endorsement from parents and teachers. Mickey Mouse Monopoly takes a close and critical look at the world these films create and the stories they tell about race, gender and class and reaches disturbing conclusions about the values propagated under the guise of innocence and fun. This daring new video insightfully analyzes Disney's cultural pedagogy, examines its corporate power, and explores its vast influence on our global culture. Including interviews with cultural critics, media scholars, child psychologists, kindergarten teachers, multicultural educators, college students and children, Mickey Mouse Monopoly will provoke audiences to confront comfortable assumptions about an American institution that is virtually synonymous with childhood pleasure. http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=112 |
| Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour | Susan Stern U.S. 1998 101 minutes | Journeying from Barbie conventions to anti-Barbie demonstrations, from girls' play dates to Barbie web pages, Barbie nation plumbs the cult of the Barbie doll, telling the Barbie stories of diverse men, women and children |
| Still Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women | Margaret Lazarus Renner Wunderlich U.S. 1987 34 minutes | Discusses the manner in which women continue to be portrayed by advertising and the effects this has on women, men, and children and their images of themselves |
| Title of Film | Director(s) Location Release Date Run Time | Political Lives of Children Brief Synopsis |
| Azzel | Guy L. Coté 1978 ***** 29 minutes | Azzel is the name of one of the first schools for nomads opened by the ***** Department of National Education. The film describes the traditional nomadic lifestyle of the Tuareg and the changes brought about in the lives of the children attending the government-run boarding schools. |
| Promises | Carlos Bolado B.Z. Goldberg Israeli, Palestinian territories 2001 106 minutes | Several Jewish and Palestinian children are followed for three years and put in touch with each other, in this alternative look at the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. The three filmmakers followed a group of seven local children between 1995 and 1998. They all have a totally different background. These seven children tell their own story about growing up in Jerusalem. Through this portrait of their generation, we see how deep rooted and almost insoluble the problems of the Middle East have become. When the protagonists speak out in an epilogue a couple of years later, it becomes apparent that all have lost their childlike innocence. |
| A Song for Argyris | Stefan Haupt Greece 2007 105 minutes | Memory, violence, trauma, political activism, and how children's experiences shape their current and later lives in complex ways (can see review by Kendra Coulter in forthcoming Anthropologica) |
| Va, vis et Deviens (Live and Become) | Radu Mihaileanu Ethiopia 2005 140 minutes | About an Ethiopian Christian boy who disguises himself as an Ethiopian Jew in order to escape famine and emigrates to Israel. Shlomo, an Ethiopian boy, is placed by his mother with an Ethiopian Jewish woman whose child has died. This woman, who will become his adoptive mother, is about to be airlifted from a Sudanese refugee camp to Israel during Operation Moses in 1984. His birth mother, who hopes for a better life for him tells him “go, live, and become” as he leaves her to board the plane. The film tells of his growing up in Israel and how he deals with the secrets he carries, not being Jewish and having left his birth mother. |
| Un coupable ideal (Murder on a Sunday Morning) | Jean-Xavier de Lestrade U.S. 2001 111 minutes | Reopened murder case that involved a potentially incorrect suspect and shocking tales of police corruption. A 15-year-old African-American accused of murdering a woman in Florida, was condemned by everyone involved with the case. But Butler's lawyer eventually reopened the investigation and found some crucial evidence to support his client's innocence. |
| War Dance | Sean Fine Andrea Nix Uganda 2007 45 minutes | Children in Uganda, War and the National Music Competition http://www.wardancethemovie.com/ |
| Title of Film | Director(s) Location Release Date Run Time | Cross-Cultural Perspectives: Children’s Everyday Experiences Brief Synopsis |
| Angotee: Story of an Eskimo Boy | Douglas Wilkinson Eastern Arctic 1953 31 minutes | The time is 1953 and the place is the eastern Arctic. This film follows the events of a man's growth from birth to maturity. Here we see how an Inuit baby is born, how the young child is treated, how he learns the arts of the hunter, grows to manhood and marries. |
| Yanomamo: A Multidisciplinary Study Arrows | Timothy Asch Napoleon Chagnon 1974 South America 10 minutes | A group of boys engages in an arrow fight in the village clearing. They shoot blunt arrows, practicing their aim and learning to dodge the shots. |
| Yanomamo: A Multidisciplinary Study Children’s Magical Death | Timothy Asch Napoleon Chagnon 1974 South America 7 minutes | Pretending to be shamans, a group of young boys imitates their fathers, blowing ashes into each other's noses and chanting to the hekura spirits. |
| The Amish: Not to be Modern | Victoria Larimore 1988 United States 57 minutes | There are 90,000 Amish who live in the U.S. and Canada, and they exist without electricity, cars, and other conveniences normally taken for granted. Their unusual lifestyle features a strong sense of community, and they have managed to escape the high crime and unemployment problems that plague the rest of their countrymen. The Amish: Not to Be Modern looks at this peaceful group over the four seasons of the year, as they go about their daily work which revolves around agriculture, church, and domestic arts, such as quilting. |
| From the Ikpeng children to the world | Vincent Carelli Cuba 2002 35 minutes | Four Ikpeng children introduce their village by answering a video-letter sent from children of Cuba's Sierra Maestra. They show their families, their toys, their celebrations, and their way of life with grace and lightheartedness. Curious about children from other cultures, they hope that their video-letter will be answered. |
| Child Brides: Changing Tradition in Rural Ethiopia | Gill Barnes Ethiopia 1999 51 minutes | In many parts of Africa, Asia, and South America, young girls are often engaged by the age of eight, and leave their homes to join their husbands by twelve. In many cases, the younger the girl, the more her family receives in the form of a dowry. This program travels to the most rural and poverty stricken regions of Ethiopia to expose the common practice of child brides and the consequences for the young girls who often give birth before they are out of childhood. |
| Children of Heaven | Majid Majidi Iran 1997/1999 89 minutes | A delightful Iranian movie about a boy who accidentally loses his sister's shoes and must share his own sneakers with her in a sort of relay while each attends school at different times during the day. Finally, the boy enters a much-publicized foot race, hoping to place third. The prize: a new pair of sneakers. |
| Die Höhle des gelben Hundes (Cave of the Yellow Dog) | Byambasuren Davaa Mongolia 2005 93 minutes | About the disappearing ways of nomadic life in Mongolia. Young Nansal, the oldest daughter of an actual nomad family, finds a stray dog that quickly becomes her close companion, despite her parents' disapproval. The film depicts the herdspeople's everyday tasks for livelihood and survival, while the city beckons from afar. |
| The Mirror | Jafar Panahi Iran 1998 | Film within a film follows a young girl as she tries to make her way home through the big city of Tehran. When her mother fails to pick her up after school, the girl dares to get home on her own. She boards a bus, timidly absorbs the events going on around her and then impetuously declares that she doesn't want to be in Panahi's film anymore. The camera crew scurries after her as she tries to lose them. |
| Highway Courtesans | Mystelle Brabbee India 2004 94 mintues | This provocative coming-of-age film chronicles the story of a bold young woman born into the Bachara community in Central India – the last hold-out of a tradition that started with India’s ancient palace courtesans and now survives with the sanctioned prostitution of every Bachara family’s oldest girl. Guddi, Shana and their neighbor Sungita serve a daily stream of roadside truckers to support their families. Their work as prostitutes forms the core of the local economy, but their contemporary ideas about freedom of choice, gender and self-determination slowly intrude on the Bachara way of life. HIGHWAY COURTESANS follows Guddi from the ages of 16 through 23 as she turns her world upside down, incurring the wrath of her fathers and brother as she struggles with tradition, family and love in hopes of realizing her dreams. In probing beyond the surface of a world of paradoxes, HIGHWAY COURTESANS resists easy moralizing and reveals the very real costs – financial, social and personal – for breaking with tradition. As a community hangs in the balance between traditional and contemporary values, this gripping documentary raises universal questions about sex, the roles of women, and the right of one culture to judge another. http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c654.shtml |
| Children of Shadows | Karen Kramer Hati 2001 54 minutes | Follows the children as they go through their daily chores - the endless cycle of cooking, washing, sweeping, mopping, going to the market, going to fetch water, going to run errands, etc. In heartbreaking interviews, the children speak openly and shyly about the lives they are forced to lead. The "aunts" (adoptive caretakers) speak openly and proudly of the vast mountain of work that "their" restavèk does for them. The camera goes deep into the countryside to interview the peasant families as to what kind of situation would force them to give away one or several of their children. Haitian social workers and economists who have spent time with the restavèks speak of the causes and possible solutions to this situation. Narrated entirely by the people themselves in their native Creole (English sub-titles), and with original Haitian music laced throughout the film, the documentary is both emotional and informative. It is the first feature-length documentary to be made on this subject, which until recently, had rarely been talked about. |
| Childhood | PBS series on Melvin Konner's work | |
| Growing Pains | Cecilie Øien Portugal 2006 41 minutes | Growing Pains is about Júlia, a black Angolan woman in her mid-twenties, who came to Portugal with a maternal aunt in March 1992. The story of how she arrived in Portugal and what happened to her afterwards is dramatic, and we follow her as she tries to make sense out of her life. As much as being a portrait of Júlia, the film highlights ambivalences that are common to many migrants: ambivalent feelings of belonging, the importance of intergenerational relations and the relation between the past, the present and the future. On one level, the film tells the story of Júlia and her life in the clandestine settlement of Cova da Moura in Greater Lisbon. On another level, however, the film is about her pathway of migration and the impact it has had on her life. Hence the title Growing Pains, alluding both to the pain of growing up and the pain of growing as a person. Her daughter Magui, who was six years old when the filming took place, also has a central role in the film. While Júlia talks of her own childhood and the challenges she has had in her life, we are introduced to Magui who is about to start school. This was a very important event for Magui, but also for Júlia who herself had a traumatic educational trajectory. The film ends with the mother's hopes and thoughts about her daughter's future, suggesting the existence of passing time and two life stories playing out within different temporalities. But above all, the narrative structure of the film moves from a focus on Júlia's life story and the past, through vignettes from their everyday life and the present, before it ends with Magui starting school and Júlia's attempt to envision her daughter's future. |
| The Up Series Seven films: Seven UP, 7 Plus Seven, 21 UP, 28 UP, 35 UP, 42 UP, 49 UP | Paul Almond United Kingdom 1964 710 minutes (total seven films) | The Up Series consists of a series of documentary films that have followed the lives of fourteen British children since 1964, when they were seven years old. The children were selected to represent the range of socio-economic backgrounds in Britain at that time, with the explicit assumption that each child's social class predetermines their future. |
| La Mémoire Dure (The Memories Last) | Rossella Ragazzi France 1999 84 minutes | In a special class in a primary school in Paris, France, children from Asia, South America and Africa, learn French through intensive courses. The film explores their integration among the French nationality pupils and the French society, the time between two languages, two places, two cultures and the space of recollection and building of new identities of young immigrants. |
| Popular Titles | ||
| Title of Film | Director(s) Location Release Date Run Time | Brief Synopsis |
| Oliver Twist | David Lean United Kingdom 1948 Feature Length | Based on the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist is about an orphan boy who runs away from a workhouse and meets a pickpocket on the streets of London. Oliver is taken in by the pickpocket and he joins a household of young boys who are trained to steal for their master. This version of Oliver Twist is topped by Alec Guinness's masterly performance of arch-thug Fagin. |
| Salaam Bombay | Mira Nair India 1988 Feature Length | The story of Krishna, Manju, Chillum and the other children on the streets of Bombay. Sometimes they can get a temporary job selling tea, but mostly they have to beg for money and keep out of the way of the police. |
| Charlie and Chocolate Factory | Tim Burton Fantasy 2005 Feature Length | Charlie Bucket is a young boy who comes from a poor but loving family and would love nothing more than to find a golden ticket to enter the amazing chocolate factory run by inventor and owner Willy Wonka. As luck would have it, Charlie finds the last golden ticket and goes on this once-in-a-lifetime adventure with his grandpa Joe. Among the other four winners are Veruca Salt, a spoiled rich girl; Augustus Gloop, a gluttonous kid who stuffs his face with sweets; Violet Beuragarde, a champion trophy gum chewer; and Mike Teavee, a kid who spends more time watching TV and playing video games than anything else. Most fascinating is the mysterious Willy Wonka who in turn had a troubled childhood and has a special grand prize at the end for one of the kids. Also along the tour are Wonka's staff the singing, working Oommpa Loompas. (Children as consumers) |
| Thirteen | Catherine Hardwicke United States 2003 Feature Length | Tracy is a more unpopular girl who desperately wants to befriend the most popular girl in school Evie. When Evie finally becomes her friend she leads Tracy into a world of drugs, sex, violence, and theft in which her mother can not save her. (Children as consumers) |
| Clueless | Amy Heckerling United States 1995 Feature Length | Cher is rich, pretty, blonde, popular and knows how to talk anyone into doing just about anything. When she can't get a teacher to give her a better grade, she and her friend Dion match him up with another teacher to make him happier... and maybe a but laxer on his expectations. When a girl named Tai transfers to Cher's school, she and Dion give her a makeover and attempt to find her a boyfriend. Cher soon realizes that she wants a boyfriend herself, but no one seems right. She goes through a spiritual makeover and realizes that there's more to life than clothes and popularity before she finds the boy of her dreams. (Children as consumers) |
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