In a much-needed realist antidote to the computer-animated version of Madagascar that’s been circulating in the popular consciousness for some time, this powerful and revelatory documentary from director-producer Cam Cowan lifts the lid on what is now one of the poorest countries in the world. Cowan tells this country’s tragic tale through the lens of three valiant women struggling in an unforgiving day-to-day fight for survival. Since 2009, especially, Madagascar has been in a state of economic and political freefall. In fact, as we learn from the film, the percentage of people living in poverty has, since 1960, gone from 30 percent to upwards of 80 percent in the 2010s. In 2009, Madagascar’s then autocrat president was driven to resign by mass public protest, and naturally “democratic” societies like the United States saw this as a coup, and immediately declared sanctions against the country—essentially punishing the Malagasy people for rising up against an arrogant, power-mad dictator. Since then, in a country dependent on foreign aid, the education and health systems have all but collapsed, leaving women like the ostensible subjects of this film, Lin, Tina, and Deborah, even more vulnerable to total destitution. Lin works as a launderess and can barely feed her six children on what she makes. Tina has to work in the local rock quarry to keep her children in school. Deborah, perhaps the most heartbreaking of all those featured, is only 18 years old but had to turn to sex work in her early teens after the 2009 economic crash and all but give up on her dreams of becoming a lawyer. Cowan’s lens takes you places that aren’t easy to go, doing much of the shooting in the dusty streets, tumbledown shacks, and unsanitary environments these three women have to confront on a daily basis. In Tina’s case, her entire family must work at the rock quarry, even her elderly parents, who’ve worked there all their lives breaking rocks for pennies a day. This bleak scenario isn’t without hope among the ruins, however. Now because of the humanitarian efforts of one Father Pedro Opeka. He organized a humanitarian network of powerful contacts that over the last thirty years has built thousands of houses for the poor and clothed, fed, educated, and sheltered many more. The hard fact this film brings to light is that Madagascar will probably always be a country whose people are dependent on private charity through individual efforts like Opeka’s. The film doesn’t leave us much hope that the international political community, at least in the West, will change their views on Madagascar anytime soon. Cowan’s film is a crucial eye-opening window onto the ever-sinking socioeconomic state of this once-thriving, proud country. Highly Recommended. Aud: C, P. (M. Sandlin)