The opening shots of a miniature coffin signal the shocking fate of Brazil's abandoned children, the subject of Sandra Werneck's exposé. Through interviews with savvy children living on the streets, discouraged parents and social workers, shop owners angered by out-of-control theft, and an imprisoned killer, The Children's War argues that the young are being systematically murdered by the police and hired killers. The enormous discrepancy between rich and poor has created a society in which kids survive by petty theft and prostitution and adults make a career of killing children.-Kathy Geritz Based on the book by Gilberto Dimenstein. (52 mins, (corr: Simultaneous English and Portuguese,) Color, 16mm (corr: 3/4' video), Courtesy Cineluz)The ScavengersEduardo Coutinho (Brazil, 1992)(Boxa da Lica). A fascinating glimpse into the social life of garbage, at a municipal dump in Sao Gonçalo, outside Rio de Janeiro. While a few of the "scavengers" are wary of the camera, most accept it as part and parcel of the intensive sociality of the place. Many indeed show evident satisfaction at scavenging for cans and critters, fruit and vegetables, not to mention swill and scrap iron, among infected syringes and stillborn babies discarded by the local hospital. Some come along on Sundays simply to socialize; as fate would have it, one woman who had even been born in the dump (discarded in a cardboard box) would later meet her husband-to-be while scavenging there. The film provides a moving portrait of a segment of the population whose humanity is typically smothered beneath the platitudes of politicians and economists, be they to the left or right. If only Michael Thompson could have seen this before writing his classic Rubbish Theory. As one seventy-year-old "naturalist" scavenger says, "The end of a job is trash... and there it begins."-I.B./L.T.