
Meet Bruce Lee, King of Romania's Tunnel Underworld
Beneath Bucharest's streets, a network of heating tunnels shelters a community of homeless orphans who have grown up sniffing aurolac paint and scavenging to survive. The film centers on a man known as Bruce Lee, who has become something like a leader among the tunnel dwellers, and follows him and the younger residents through the cramped, steam-pipe corridors they call home. Cameras capture the daily routine of addiction, the makeshift shelters built from scrap, and the fractured family structures that have formed underground in place of the ones these kids lost or fled. Interviews let several of the tunnel's residents describe how they ended up there, many after aging out of Romania's orphanage system with nowhere else to go. The film does not offer a solution, just a close, unflinching look at a group Romanian society has largely stopped seeing, and at a man who has made himself responsible for the ones younger than him.