“You look to the sky and you see a plane. The plane is like the claw. It comes down and takes a child – maybe your best friend – never to be seen again. Where did they go? I don’t understand…But I want to go on the plane”.

What happens when you take an abandoned Brazilian street kid from the favelas of Salvador, and drop him into privileged English society? Three decades later, Pablo is still trying to figure things out.

Director’s Vision for ‘The (Lost Found) Boy Man Bunny’

We’d been keeping our eyes peeled for someone interesting in the neighbourhood to go out and film. My partner suggested I talk to The Disco Bunny – an unusual street performer who was gathering a bit of buzz around him on her social media. We followed him for a while to see what story would present itself. Watching him dance to his boombox, he seemed to invoke a collective madness on the grey streets of Britain – like some exotic alien from another planet with a magic off-switch for British reserve. It turned out that at the age of six, he had actually arrived from a very different world.

What begins as a vignette about a colourful street performer, quickly reveals layers that touch on themes of identity, race, the meaning of family, the hunger for fame, the English class system, homophobia, abandonment and hope, as Pablo tries to recreate his unremembered former life as a street kid from the favelas of Salvador. Sometimes you love him, sometimes he drives you mad. But like Pablo himself, the film flips back and forth from light to dark, frequently catching you off guard, but never straying too far from the pure joy that The Disco Bunny can bring out in us all.