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Students Tell the Story in HBO's Look at a Russian School Seized by Terrorists
There is no voice-over in "Children of Beslan," just the often matter-of-fact, sometimes sad voices of the Russian children themselves as they reconstruct the three-day siege of their school by Chechen terrorists in September 2004. When it was over, about 350 of the 1,300 or so children and adults held hostage had been killed by bombs and gunfire, and a city's spirit had been destroyed.
The Peabody committee called the 2005 program, produced by the BBC in association with HBO Documentary Films, "The simplest and most direct of several documentaries on the subject, and the most shattering."
A young boy leads a camera crew through the bombed-out rubble of his school, only to end up in the room where his father was killed. A little girl recalls how she didn't want to take off her dress so her mother could wipe a pool of blood off the floor and make more room to sit because "My dress was beautiful and it was embroidered." Another boy talks of how he sat hoping that the fictional Harry Potter would...