Haiduc

Nicu was just seven years old when he ran away from his home in Romania. His flight took him from a life with a violent drunken father into another brutal world. His new home was a sewage tunnel at Bucharest railway station, living alongside many other homeless people. He was given the nickname Haiduc (Gangster) and quickly came into contact with drugs. What saved him was ending up in the hospital. “Ms. Raluca is a godsend. She is a wonderful woman,” says the teenager about the lady who runs the homeless shelter Nicu now lives in. In front of the camera, this lean and restless boy with a cheeky smile, his cap askew, talks about his troubled youth and his future. Although he feels “10,000 times better” than before, he still feels the lure of the street. Nicu takes the filmmakers with him to his underground past in the sewer. Back among the stray dogs and homeless addicts, who have furnished their bleak surroundings with a TV, a radio and posters on the painted pink wall, Nicu succumbs again to the drugs that made him so ill. Disappointed, Raluca urges him to make a choice: stop or keep getting sicker.