This documentary film analyzes the history and reality of sugar cane agriculture and sugar industry, which support politics, economics, the society and the lives of 3 million people of Negros Island in Philippine. The sugar industry gives the planters the power and wealth under the Spanish and American colonial rule, but farm laborers who cannot work while the sugar canes ripen into “pure” sugar must spend “dead time” without any earning. During the dictator, Marcos era, the distribution of sugar cane and sugar trade which had been a state monopoly, worked as a home of power corruption. Landholders get a rake-off but laborers are only left with debt. This was one of the biggest factors contributing to the communists’ armed uprising. After the accomplishment of democratization under the era of Corazon Aquino, there was a trial to change the industrial system, such as the reformation of land ownership to a guild form or joint management of farms by the laborers. However, juicy interviews hurtfully testify that those trials haven’t alleviated laborers’ poverty. Meanwhile, the poverty of immigrant workers from another island, Sakadas, is another serious problem. The camera catches the scenes where laborers are working in the sugar cane field until 7 o’clock in the morning on Christmas Day, the biggest holiday of a Catholic country, the Philippines, because they can’t afford to go back home. The director forecasts that the landlords will obviously go bankrupt if cheaper sugar is imported from Thailand or Indonesia after the ASEAN FTA take effect in 2015. The most attractive part of this film is the combination of archive footages and interviews of decaying landlords done by the director who comes from a proprietary class family. As the landlord states that they can’t give up the feudal relationship with peasants and the empty community power, the images proving their past prosperity arouses peculiar effect to remind us The Leopard by Visconti. The honesty of Jay ABELLO who doesn’t deny his nostalgia might be the hidden power of this documentary which can be easily distracted because of too many interviews. It is also quite interesting to combine newsreel footages and the scenes acted in front of a blue screen, or to enact the history parading old historical photos with cutout animation technique. (SHIN Eun-shil)