Leningradsky is a busy train station in Moscow, and the people who pass through it every day have to notice the children who live there. Some give them a little spare change. Some ask them to come home with them and have sex. Some, the good people, offer to help. But, as one boy says, "Of course there aren't too many good people left."
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The Children of Leningradsky. Video hosted on Google. Nominated for the 2004 Academy Award for Best Documentary, Short Subject, this documentary takes an intimate and heartbreaking look at a group of homeless children living in and around a Moscow train station. Please visit the website and help these children. 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. Polish filmmakers Hanna Polak and Andrzej Celinski captured numerous intimate and heartbreaking scenes in this raw, verité documentary, which combines footage of the children and Moscow authorities with alarming statistics about homelessness and its devastating effects in post-Soviet Russia.
The children living in Leningradsky Station range anywhere in age from 8 to 14 and in their short lives they’ve seen, lived, and died more than people five times their age. They’ve been beaten, abandoned, used, and discarded by druggie/alcoholic parents and inhuman policemen. They pass their miserable days either sniffing glue (klay), beating up older homeless people, begging for change, drinking vodka (a Russian staple), or pining for their mothers. No, “The Children of Leningradsky” is not the feel-good film of the year. In fact, it’s about the most disturbing thing you can imagine, outside the canon of Pauly Shore, that is. And Polak and Celinski are simply unsparing in their presentation of these tragic circumstances. Their camera knows virtually no bounds as it fearlessly descends into the children’s murky underground dwellings or slyly captures a policeman viciously pouring “klay” over a young boy’s head. While I fear these images will stick with me for a long time to come, there is one moment in particular that I’m sure I’ll never shake. This haunting moment is of a lost little boy who tearfully reveals that without his mother “it’s as if the city was empty.” That beyond-its-years wisdom and eloquence is a common trait among these kids, whose despairing, innocent hearts will likely never see past their 15th birthdays.
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