Voices of Innocence

A powerful epiphany has just overtaken Sanabel, the lively Palestinian girl featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Promises.” She has discovered how to solve the Middle East violence that has been her reality for as long as she’s been alive.

“Arabs and Jews should meet,” she tells her friends at the Deheishe refugee camp.

“But Netanyahu ... “ Araj interrupts, with the name of the then-prime minister, a hard-line conservative.

“Not politicians; I want children to meet,” Sanabel explains. “No Palestinian child ever tried to explain our situation to the Jews.” Sanabel is convinced. Araj, pessimistic. Both demonstrate why all five of this year’s documentaries nominated for an Academy Award either focus on or memorably feature children.

Whether uncensored or shy, pensive or programmed, children exhibit both the resistance to and absorbance of the troubled times they’ve inherited. And when seeking to personalize the complicated and disturbing issues of our world, these nominated filmmakers have found powerful sources in the often candid speech, or even just the face, of a child.

For Deborah Dickson, co-director of one of the nominees, “LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton,” the strong presence of children among the documentaries does not come as a surprise.

“Children are, by definition, innocent, so when bad things happen to them, we feel it more acutely,” Dickson says. “They should be able to grow up in a normal way. And if they’re robbed of that, whether through poverty or war or bad parenting or racism, then you’re robbing them of who they really could be. Children are our hope for the future, or they’re not.”

Arnold Schwartzman, vice chairman of the academy’s documentary committee, sees the central role of children in the nominated documentaries as a coincidental, but understandable, result of one of the genre’s central goals.

“I think people really go for the documentaries that send strong messages and will hopefully change the world for the better in some respect,” he says. “And I think if you want to change a situation, you start with the young people.”

Illuminating an Underground Culture

For countless children in Romania, any hope of change seems distant at best. “Children Underground,” the first feature film of Edet Belzberg and winner of the Special Jury Prize at Sundance, follows five orphans and runaways living in a subway station in Bucharest--a city where an estimated 20,000 children live on the streets.

In telling their stories, the camera is unflinching, showing beds made of cardboard, squabbles over the drug aurolac, an addictive industrial paint that can be purchased over the counter, tears from being beaten by aggressive passersby, and occasional visits from social workers, who know the children by name and take them to a shelter to be deloused, but can’t do anything more.

It’s a downward spiral of a story, and Belzberg, who spent much of 1998 with the children, knew her film would present a viewing challenge. But, she says, she owed it to them to shed light underground.

“The more I saw what they endured, the stronger my conviction grew that people have to see what’s happening here,” she says. “I was very clear about what I was doing and they wanted their story to be told. They no longer wanted to be nameless, voiceless creatures. I think instinctually they knew what was happening to them was wrong.”

For children growing up in the Mississippi Delta, a place where cotton is still king and boys not yet in kindergarten know the word “penitentiary,” their instincts are up against a legacy that’s been “programmed for poverty,” as co-director Susan Froemke says.

In a trailer with no running water and a junkyard as a playground, 62-year-old LaLee Wallace is raising an ever-changing number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, depending on which of her 11 children are in a position to care for their own. Every day, without fail, the resilient matriarch provides food, shelter and clothing, even a little play time. In between, she preaches the value of family, hard work and getting on the school bus each morning.

Filmed by Sundance’s 2001 cinematography winner Albert Maysles in his direct and unobtrusive style, “LaLee’s Kin” spends a great deal of time lingering on the faces of the children, watching to see what lessons they take in. For as often as LaLee and school superintendent Reggie Barnes try to pass their wisdom along, they’re still fighting a lasting legacy. And though “LaLee’s Kin” shows a future that’s certainly precarious, it’s also a future with small but crucial hope.

“Murder on a Sunday Morning” also examines a precarious future, that of 15-year-old Brenton Butler, who walked out of his door one morning to find himself charged with murder.

Earlier that day--May 7, 2000--a female tourist had been killed during an armed robbery at her Jacksonville, Fla., motel. Within 90 minutes, police spotted Butler in the area, and although he was younger and smaller than the suspect had been described, they brought him to the victim’s husband, an eyewitness. The husband identified Butler immediately, and with that, the investigation was done.

Director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and producer Denis Poncet had been in Jacksonville researching the court system when a hearing for Butler caught their attention.

“The face of Brenton Butler was amazing to me. He seemed to be lost. He was searching for his parents, who weren’t there that day,” De Lestrade says. “I didn’t know at the time if he was innocent or guilty [but] I really wanted to tell how he got there.”

To relay that story, De Lestrade films both inside and outside the courtroom, contrasting images of detectives sweating on the witness stand with those of public defenders Patrick McGuinness and Ann Finnell tracking down the truth in their spare time.

The inaccuracies they discover raise serious questions about the thoroughness and tactics of law enforcement officials.

But the filmmakers also never forget the film’s emotional core. As Butler sits in the courtroom, hearing himself called a liar and a killer, the camera often lingers on his silent facade, allowing the audience to imagine what emotions it’s concealing.

Putting Faces on Conflicts

In his 25 years as a photojournalist for Time, Life, and several other publications, James Nachtwey, the protagonist of “War Photographer,” has captured enough of the world’s horrors to create “his own library of suffering in his head,” as one of his editors says. A countless number of these images involve children crawling over abandoned tanks or placing flowers on body bags with no parents in sight.

But Nachtwey never seeks out children to make a scene more emotional, says the documentary’s producer, director and editor, Christian Frei. He seeks out the humanity and truth amid the horror, and children are part of both.

Frei, who followed Nachtwey for two years through Indonesia, Kosovo and the West Bank, filmed the photographer at work as unobtrusively as possible, with a miniature camera attached to Nachtwey’s camera and a one-man crew of cinematographer Peter Indergand. “War Photographer” also uncovers how Nachtwey thinks, a character study that’s not only key to the film’s central questions about the media’s role but also to Nachtwey’s continued existence as a photographer.

“The worst thing is to feel that ... I am benefiting from someone else’s tragedy,” Nachtwey explains. “It is something I have to reckon with every day because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul.”

Youngsters Don’t Mince Words About Strife

Not far from where Nachtwey was tear-gassed in the West Bank, a group of children tosses a tire playfully down a hill, in an opening scene from “Promises.” A few scenes later, another tire rolls down screen--this time, in flames.

During the documentary, the audience gets an intimate view of seven children--four Israelis and three Palestinians, all of whom live in and around Jerusalem. Shot during a time of relative peace, the film follows filmmaker B.Z. Goldberg as he visits the homes of the children, all of them bright, articulate and full of personality.

Although the oldest is 13, all have opinions about the conflict, formed by what they’ve heard from their parents and what they see every day.

Co-director and producer Justine Shapiro said she was instantly impressed by the first child they met, 8-year-old Moishe, and that “even if they are parroting their elders, they’re still saying things on camera that elders never would.”

“A lot of people challenged our decision to work with such young kids. ‘You’re making a film on such a difficult, complex, tense issue, how can you leave it in the hands of young kids?’” Shapiro said.

“But we just had ... to believe that if we were being blown away by these kids, audiences would be too. I think a lot of people tend to underestimate just how much children can teach us.”

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“Children Underground” will air on Cinemax in July. “LaLee’s’s Kin” will air on HBO May 12. “Murder on a Sunday Morning” will air on HBO March 31. “War Photographer” will open in New York June 19 at Film Forum. A Los Angeles date is currently being scheduled. “Promises” will open at the Laemmle’s Music Hall on Friday. The International Documentary Assn. (IDA) will hold its 20th annual DocuDay on Saturday, with screenings of all the nominated documentary features and short films. Discussions with the filmmakers will follow each screening. Tickets will be sold at the door. Prices are $7 per screening or $30 for the whole day. IDA/Academy members: $5; seniors/students: $20. For information, call (213) 534-3600 or visit www.documentary.org.