A young boy lives in crushing poverty with his two older sisters. His mother is in prison for drug offences. His oldest sister vows to run the home properly in her absence. The sister closest to him in age stays away from home for nights on end. The schools, overworked and weary, try their best to provide care and discipline, but it is much too little. This is a family forced to make a cooker in their apartment by hewing solid rock. The mother's legacy is that the house is a drug den - we see Toto, barely ten years old, go to sleep while injecting addicts sit on his bed, used syringes strewn around him. The oldest sister, so resolute at the beginning that she would sort out the family problems, instead becomes an addict herself. In the centre of all this is Toto; mischievous, adrift, feral. You fear from him. And then, in the midst of all this bleakness, Toto joins a dance class. And to see him dance is to glimpse hope. A film that seemed a stream of unrelenting misery suddenly soars and offers moments of joy. Toto and His Sisters presents humanity in all its squalor and glory. A quite astonishing documentary that burns itself onto your soul.
Review of Toto and His Sisters
