Filmmaker Ditsi Carolino achieves an amazing intimacy in her cinema verite portrait of a young Filipino couple, Eddie and Pen Renomeron, their three adopted children and two kids of their own. The family lives in a neighborhood teaming with makeshift houses crowded dangerously close to the railway tracks in the Philippine capital Manila. Between the rails, children play, handmade carts are transported, men gamble and women socialize. When a train approaches, everyone steps aside for a moment and, once the cars have rumbled past, life resumes its normal course. Eddie and Pen have serious worries, because the landlord has announced that their "house" is to be demolished. They owe a great deal in back rent. Eddie earns almost nothing selling duck eggs and the pittance that Pen receives as a maid does not help enough. They each cope with their anxieties in different ways: Eddie converts his hard-earned cash into booze whenever he gets a chance and when Pen finds her husband drunk, she flies into a rage. Filmmaker Carolino exhibits remarkable skill in capturing the seminal moments of emotion and humor in one family's life journey.

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