A film puts faces on unseen street children

On the edge of Istiklal, home to many of Istanbul's hippest clubs, a teenage boy named Hassan Dogan Yildiz sways and stumbles as though standing on a boat at sea.

He lifts a blackened hand and holds a cloth to his nose and mouth, as though to keep warm. But the cloth is soaked with glue, and as the piercing smell rises, a shopkeeper hastily offers a free pastry to make him go away.

There isn't much that keeps Hassan - or some 15,000 other children living on the streets - from capsizing completely. And it is having watched children get pulled under that spurred Umit Cin Guven to make "Children of Secret," a haunting portrayal of kids surviving on a diet of drugs, donations - and theft.

The film, which has won several Turkish awards, was Mr. Guven's way of trying to expose a dark underside of Turkish society. A largely con- servative Muslim nation run by a central government seen as the defender of its citizens' interests, Turkey is not accustomed to acknowledging that so many young people may be struggling to survive on their own. And experts say the country's economic crisis, which many Turks suspect will only worsen in any war against Iraq, is increasing the number of children who leave home and end up in places like the one Hassan lives in: the dark, dank lobby of an abandoned building.

"My aim was to put this on the agenda," Guven says over a glass of tea on an Istiklal side street. "There has never been an official recognition of this problem. Our idea was to show the government that something should be done for these kids, to wake up the public, to make people do something. This is not only the government problem, it's the whole system's problem."

Guven, a boyish-looking Turk in his late 20s, was headed home on a cold February day a few years ago when he saw a boy sleeping in a phone booth. "I felt sorry for him because it was very cold," Guven recalls, dark brown eyes tightening at the memory. The following day, he learned that the boy in the booth had frozen to death overnight.

"I felt terrible. I can't even find the words to describe what I felt," he says. "Maybe giving this kid a blanket would have prevented him from dying. People in the neighborhood were so unemotional about it.... And I realized that something should be done for [other kids like him]."

The resulting film explores the fragile lives of street children - as well, often, of their families - through the story of a 10-year-old boy named Cemil, who runs away from home because of an abusive stepfather. He is taken in by other street children, who start trying to raise money to send him home. Meanwhile, his mother, who comes to Istanbul to look for him, faces her own struggles as she is pursued by her former brothers-in-law, who feel her divorce hurt the family honor.

Guven started his research for the film by spending time in places where streets kids hang out, trying to work his way into their world. For months, they simply avoided this odd guy who was following them around, obviously too clean and coherent to be one of them.

Playing anthropologist, Guven noticed their patterns: They had specific days designated for bathing or washing their clothes, a loose code of ethics to help one another out, and a regular cycle: sleep by day, get high and beg for cash - or steal - at night.

But perhaps Guven's most important discovery was the ultimate interpreter: a former street kid who managed to turn his life around.

Ersin Salah Altinok ran away when he was 9 years old, and spent the next 23 years on the streets.

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