The sampaguita may be the national flower of the Philippines, but it's a source of shame in this beautifully shot docudrama concerning the difficult lives of children who ply the delicate flowers for survival. Opening in the lush predawn fields where the sampaguitas are harvested and then moving to the teeming streets of Manila where they're sold late into the night (once cut, the flowers only hold their fragrance for a short time), director Francis Xavier Pasion uses the flowers' journey to delve into poverty's bitter divide. Working with a group of street children who sell the flowers in real life, Pasion adapts their actual stories into contained dramatic episodes, some heartbreaking, others euphoric, but all wisely avoiding any sense of resolution or finality. Woven through the dramatizations are excerpts from the original interviews that Pasion conducted with the children prior to filming. Besides highlighting the collaborative nature of Sampaguita, these direct encounters are a testament to the street children's surprising resilience to deplorable circumstances.