THE Rose Seller is anything but rosy. A variation on the tale of the Little Match Girl, it follows the lives of street urchins as they eke out a tough existence in the slums of Medellin, Columbia over a 48 hour period at Christmas time. Thirteen-year-old Monica lives with a spirited group of teenage runaway girls. They sell roses to survive. It is not easy, particularly as they are still unhardened to street life like some of the older, more experienced kids. But they are moving up in the world, ripping off motorists sitting at traffic lights, experimenting with prostitution and developing glue-sniffing habits. Glue-sniffing, the cheapest high on the market, is happening everywhere in this film. The children are snorting and talking glue throughout. "You smell like glue," says Monica before kissing her drug-dealing pubescent boyfriend. "You're completely glued," another tries to tell her friend when she starts hallucinating. "You're doing too much glue". "You've nicked my stash of glue". And so on.

Conditions may be deplorable, but director Victor Gaviria's slab of cinema veritee avoids sermonising, glamorising or melodrama, simply allowing his young cast and events to speak for themselves.

However, while the camera's cold, all-seeing eye is convincing, and all the more unsettling for that, the film at times seems rudderless and sprawling. The narrative encompasses an unwieldy number of tales of personal tragedy, and the dialogue falls so fast and furiously that just following the subtitles is hard enough work. You never really get under the skin of any one of the characters.

While the subject matter is depressing, it is not without colour. It takes place against a backdrop of Christmas celebrations, with bright lights, music, and colourful catholic iconography. Fireworks crackle and whizz throughout the night, hiding the sound of murderous gunfire. The narrative is also interspersed with a number of glue-induced, hallucination sequences that provide some, but not a great deal of, insight into the childrens' sense of vulnerablility. While this is a film of some socio-political force, the lack of narrative focus tests one's patience and doesn't ever attain the potency that the real life tragedy deserves.