The debut feature of Paul Sta. Ana, writer of Trespassers (VIFF 11), is set in the slums of Manila—but it’s not the kind of Filipino movie satirized in Woman in a Septic Tank. The film is first and foremost an analysis of the way a certain “black economy” works for those at the lowest levels of society, although there’s nothing academic or dryly sociological about it. There are two things you need to know before seeing it. One, gambling is illegal in the Philippines. Two, sakla (an old Spanish card game, played for odds) is tolerated by some authorities in some circumstances—notably at traditional, protracted wakes for the dead. Makoy (a really terrific performance from Kristoffer King) profits from these circumstances by buying an unidentified corpse from a morgue to stage a fake wake, at which he can run a sakla game. He and his kid brother Abet, a reluctant accomplice, need to come up with a cover story to explain the deceased’s identity and relationship to the sakla players. This of course demands the complicity of the players themselves, who include the cash-strapped Linda (Tanya Gomez, also terrific). It’s a situation in which many things could go wrong… Sta. Ana avoids the “misery tourism” trap by focusing on believable characters in a believably fraught operation. For a story about the dead and the desperate, it’s remarkably exhilarating. — Tony Rayns