In 2011 I travelled from Italy to Bucharest, where I spent a few weeks photographing the sewage system of Gare Du Nord (the city’s main train station) and the children who call it home.
Under the guidance of a heavily-tattooed 30-year-old man who calls himself “Bruce Lee”, they spend their days begging in the street and sniffing a toxic paint called Aurolac. They meet every afternoon in the sewer, form a circle and begin their ritual. “It makes us forget the hunger and the piercing cold for a few minutes, but then everything gets worse and you want to die. This is why a lot of us end up cutting ourselves with knives and razor blades,” explained Bruce, as he showed me his own scars.
You know how sometimes in nature, a weak animal will make loud noises to scare off a larger opponent; like a Chihuahua barking at a German Shepherd? Well, this guy, who VICE Romania’s Robert Chirileanu filmed at the recent protests in Bucharest, is the Chihuahua. Surrounded by his armed buddies, but not equipped himself as he leads the charge towards a gang of masked protesters, he decides to reach for the only remaining weapon in his arsenal: his voice.
I arrived at University Square, in the middle of Bucharest, at about 10PM Sunday night. Almost two thousand people were protesting against President Traian Basescu, who tried to reform the national emergency healthcare system, the only part of Romanian healthcare that actually works. As with most protests, the attendees could be neatly divided into two camps: the peaceful and the violent.
