The Children of Beslan...

News & Press

HBO
On September 1, 2004, a group of heavily armed rebel extremists stormed into School No. 1 in Beslan, Russia. For three days, more than a thousand children and adults were held hostage in a sweltering gymnasium, denied food and water, and forced to keep their hands over their heads. The harrowing siege ended on September 3 with a series of explosions and a hail of gunfire that killed some 350 people - half of them children. In this film, the youngest survivors of Beslan tell their story.

moscowhelp.org
Beslan School Terror Act Victims Continue to Receive International Medical Help - ILONA KARGIEVA, a 9-year old girl who lost her eye in the Beslan School Terror Attack last year, is scheduled to undergo complicated eye implant surgery.

More than $1.1 million have been transferred to families of children victims.

The Washington Post
The Mothers of Beslan, a local advocacy group that keeps a roll of the dead, said 22 6- and 7-year-olds, among nearly 90 first-graders, were killed in the siege. Thirty-one terrorists were also killed, according to Russian officials.

One year later, the children are preparing to go back to school, many for the first time since the siege. Tamerlan and his classmates are at the heart of Beslan's struggle to endure. The first-graders are the most vulnerable group in this small city, psychologists said, because the only school day they know is the day they and their families became hostages.

DigitalFilmMaker.com
“In this film the children of Beslan tell their story.”
That statement from the film says everything. In their own words. In their own time. Their own way. There is no narrator. There are only the voices of the children and an occasional place card that leads us with limited though pointed information to the next step. It is all that we need. It works wonderfully well. These children are the survivors of the 57-hour siege at School No. 1 in Beslan, Russia in 2004. In this powerful film seen on HBO in a co-production with the BBC, more than a dozen children tell the story of the harrowing takeover of their school by terrorists. By the time the siege ended more than 350 died, half of them children, most of whom were very young, very small.