STOLEN CHILDHOODS

Year: 2005
USA: Balcony Releasing
Cast: Meryl Streep (narrator), Pharis Harvey, Kailash Satyarthi, Wangari Maathai, Bruce Harris, Inderjit Khurana, Senator Tom Harkin
Director: Len Morris
Country: USA
USA Release Date: 3 June 2005 (Limited Release - Los Angeles)
USA Release Date: 20 May 2005 (Limited Release - New York)

Synopsis

Narrated by Meryl Streep, STOLEN CHILDHOODS is a documentary feature film about the 246 million child laborers in the world today. Extraordinary footage and interviews with child slaves and kids working in poverty reveal young childhoods stolen away, and demands a call for action.

STOLEN CHILDHOODS is the first feature documentary on global child labor ever produced. 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.

Shot in eight countries (Brazil, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal and the United States), the film includes slave and bonded labor footage never seen before.