Becoming Fools Deleted Scene: Panchorizo

Many scenes in a documentary morph over the course of editing, and others end up on deleted on the “cutting room floor”. We captured 5 Terabytes of footage for Becoming Fools over the course of two years, so we had a lot of material to work with. I wrestled with the footage for about ten months as I edited the story, focusing in on the journey of street youth as they prepared for a theatrical event on a professional stage. One scene that ended up being cut is the Panchorizo Event.
Panchorizo is an incredibly talented entertainer in Guatemala who performs as a comedian, acrobat, and musician for audiences of all ages. During Becoming Fools, we took a few of the street youth to his performance at the Guatemalan National Theatre to inspire them. Panchorizo began performing in the streets of Guatemala and is now a full time professional artist who performs to sold out shows. I loved the motivation of the scene: the youth caught a glimpse of what is possible when someone devotes themselves to something and works hard at it. But sometimes we need to cut things that we like.
Panchorizo was originally supposed to be very involved with the Becoming Fools film, but he became very busy with his work and didn’t have the margin to join the cast. So, this was the only scene with Panchorizo. It is a fun scene with a lot of laughs, but in the editing process, we decided that it didn’t really push the story forward, so we cut it from the film. Thankfully we can still share it in this form.