"Squatterpunk" follows an eight year old Slum King named Hapon, a cocky would-be gangster, through one of the thousands of shanty towns that sprang up between the cracks in the Manila pavement. Like watching infants at play at a car crash, it's a hypnotic, almost seamless mix of social realism and visual poetry. The relentless noise leaves no room for dialog, making a stark impression without comment and, more significantly, without judgment.
A vivid and jarring collection of postcards of innocence at the brink of a short and possibly non-existent adolescence, of simple pleasures amidst appalling squalor, of human junk that society ignores in a country the rest of the world prefers to forget.