Director: Liviu Tipurita Producer: Liviu Tipurita
Country: UK
Runtime: 59 min
Italian Premiere
Synopsis
Across Europe thousands of very young Roma children are being forced onto the streets to beg and steal. Romanian Gypsy organized criminal gangs take advantage of the fact that in most European countries the age of legal responsibility is 14. They traffic these children on a massive scale and make millions of Euros by ruthlessly exploiting them. Award-winning filmmaker Liviu Tipurita spent seven months investigating this new criminal phenomenon in Spain, Italy and Romania. In this documentary he reveals how law enforcement agencies are seemingly powerless to prevent it. He goes inside the closed world of Romanian Gypsies - the poorest and most marginalized community in Europe - to expose the shocking plight of these children. He captures on camera the racism the Gypsies are being subjected to, but also the involvement of the families in the exploitation of the children.
Director
Liviu Tipurita
Liviu Tipurita is a multi-award-winning director who specializes in investigative and observational documentaries. He has worked in television for over fifteen years for the BBC, Channel4, ITV, CNN, ABC and NBC. Liviu films, directs and produces visually accomplished, strong narrative programmes. His documentaries deal with very sensitive subjects - child trafficking, sex abuse, terrorism, prostitution, human trafficking. Born and raised in Transylvania, Romania, Liviu emigrated to the UK in 1990 and studied filmmaking in Newcastle and Edinburgh. As a film student, he wrote and directed several short award-winning fiction films. Currently, Liviu is developing his first feature-length fiction film.
He specializes in investigative documentaries about sensitive subjects - child trafficking, sex abuse, terrorism, prostitution. In 2003, Liviu made “The Child Sex Trade” for Cutting Edge/Channel 4 - a documentary investigating paedophile rings and the pan-European trafficking of children, which won several major international awards.
