This film’s title deliberately recalls Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic fairy tale “The Little Match Girl,” which served as the model for the story of street children who eke out a living by selling whatever they can and by sniffing glue to forget the grinding poverty and ever-present violence around them. Inspired by a girl selling roses in the city’s nightclubs, Gaviria uses a constantly moving camera to follow the cast of very young nonprofessionals with relentless intensity as they travel between the slums where they live to upscale city streets and back again. The film bears astonishing witness to Gaviria’s ability to cast and work with untrained actors, several of whom, like some of the performers in Rodrigo D, were dead within months of the film’s production.