Nine-year-old Toto lives with his teenage sisters Ana and Andreea in a barely habitable apartment building on the outskirts of Bucharest. Toto’s mother has been in prison for drug dealing for over four years, and his uncles use the apartment as a meeting place to sell and take drugs.

Alexander Nanau’s compassionate fly-on-the-wall documentary strikes a fine balance between moments of hope and despair. Collapsing the lines between documentary & fiction, the film provides us with an ethically intriguing way of looking at marginalized lives, without exploiting the subjects’ misery.