Цитата:
"Jean Harlez was a curious and endearing character - son of a blacksmith, for three years assistant to Charles Dekeukeleire, set designer for a proletarian theatre company and self-taught film-maker, he started out by shooting a short film in Wallonia about a farmers' co-operative (using a camera he built himself) before embarking in 1956 on a neo-realist film. Over several months, he filmed in the old Marolles district of Brussels with a bunch of street urchins and a couple of adults, transporting his makeshift equipment in a wheelbarrow, urging the kids to improvise, clambering about on roofs with electric cables and investing all his savings. The theme of this film was the children's view on the destruction of a working-class area - the loss, for them, of the dilapidated alleyways and waste ground where they met up and played. Their anger, their futile revolt against the demolition workers only serve to confirm their powerlessness and status as social outcasts.

Harlez edited the film in his tiny cellar-kitchen, running out of money before he could complete the soundtrack. In the '60s, he made a series of documentaries on Greenland and the Faeroe Islands. Then, in 1969, he was awarded funds by the Belgian Department of Education to record the track and commentary to three short films reworking images from The Children's Building Site (Le Chantier des Gosses), intended to illustrate classes in ethics. He seized this opportunity to complete his original film, officially premiered and shown on rare occasions in 1970. Despite all its inadequacies, it would be most welcome to see again this valuable record of the now-vanished face of the Marolles."

(Marianne Thys in the encyclopedia Belgian Cinema)

The sound of this first Belgian neorealist feature isn't always synchronous because it was added 15 years later with very few means, and not because of the rip. There are no subtitles (English ones doesn't exist anyhow), but there's little (vital) dialogue.