Mogilino Care Home

I didn't see all of this, only the last half hour. Painful, very difficult viewing, but I kept watching Kate Blewett's documentary about a social care home for abandoned, disabled children in Mogilino, Bulgaria. The children are basically clothed and fed (what looked like animal feed), but they're wasting away, their limbs like dried-up sticks, their bodies and minds utterly deprived of stimulation and fresh air. Medical care seems non-existent. The staff are almost pathologically oblivious. A young girl writing letters over and over to her mother, folding them, never sending them, tucking them into her worn purple handbag. Her mother has told the institute she never wants contact with her daughter, but the staff tell her anyway that 'her mummy is coming for her'. She packs her plastic bag and waits, she is in a constant state of waiting. A small boy has had a thumb - gangrenous from being sucked - amputated. A young girl, emaciated, with a broken leg awkwardly splinted, wearing a nappy, lying in bed, desolately, asking if she can go out. (My impression was that the staff had not at first realised her leg was broken, God knows what agony the child had gone through beforehand.) A lot of the children are rocking, one boy hitting the wall repeatedly. Another boy blowing a kiss out of window to the camera. Two mute children have been beaten by the laundry man.

Kate Blewett talks about the children being 'warehoused for life'. One in fifty Bulgarian children are abandoned to care homes. One grown man, in a home for adults, saying more than anything else he wants a mother. There are holes in the floor, not the carpet, the floor. A man called Bobo dancing to a cheap radio.

The director of Mogilino refused to be filmed until the end. She blamed the staff for the neglect of the children and said the home was so lovely she would stay there herself. She defended herself by saying she'd bought three umbrellas for the swimming pool, so she must be a good director. Her clinical detachment about the plight of the children was hard to believe. These children are basically being left die or go insane through physical and emotional neglect. There is no justification for this, any of it. The documentary seems to have had some impact, let's hope these wretched little lives can be hugely improved.