Over a plane's-eye view of Santa Fe, Argentina, a narrator supplies us with statistics about the burgeoning city, down to minute detail. We land on the outskirts, at a train station where children from a nearby shantytown meet each train to earn a few pennies. The children and their parents give their statistics too: “I'm twenty-nine but I may as well be forty,” says one woman. Fernando Birri's film, a “social inquiry” into a people fighting for their lives, is deceptively polite: by letting the people speak for themselves, he intends to devastate.