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“I took a recognizance trip to Bucharest, where I lived with a group of children for almost two weeks. Very quickly it became clear that nothing of what I’d read or seen on film had fully captured what these children were living through. The idea for the film came out of the belief that a full-length documentary would allow a truer picture of the children’s lives to emerge. An hour or 90 minutes would bring people into the center of the children’s world for more than a few minutes on a news show, and also allow the characters to be portrayed as individuals, rather than symbols of a social problem.”
Edet Belzberg received her Master’s Degree in 1997 from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Her documentary short A MASTER VIOLINIST, about a Chinese political refugee, won the Columbia University School of Journalism’s John M. Patterson Enterprise Award in 1997. Since then she has been a guest lecturer each year at Columbia’s School of Journalism, speaking to both urban reporting and documentary filmmaking classes. Additionally, in 2001, she taught a documentary class to graduate students at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Belzberg’s first feature film, CHILDREN UNDERGROUND - a groundbreaking documentary that travels inside the harrowing world of abandoned street children in Romania - won the Special Jury Prize at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, the Best Documentary Film Award from the International Documentary Association, and received a 2001 Academy Award nomination. CHILDREN UNDERGROUND had its U.S. theatrical premiere at Film Forum in New York City in September 2001. |
