Ten-year-old Noland, a mute lantern maker, imagines that he sees an angel falling from the sky to the slums where he lives. But it’s only an American tourist who is caught in a drive-by shooting of a political journalist. At a busy intersection in Manila, the magical and seedy collide: shimmering lanterns and poverty, Christmas carols and child prostitution, dreams of friendship and the global ‘war on terror’. A hut in the slums becomes a cathedral and silence is an exchange of breaths.
