Like a comedic latter-day version of "Low Life," Luc Sante's classic portrait of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, Saunders' satisfyingly dense plot is filled with wild digressions, lunging from love to heroin, from corporate head-hunting to lounging in Central Park, from green cards to gay flirtation, from a day at the beach to the routine of a Spanish-language telephone sex operation.

Shooting in two weeks in old tenement buildings during an August heat wave, Saunders and company fill their dense narrative with fresh verbal wit to jolting narrative turns. The result is a wholly convincing non-slacker portrait of how communities evolve and clash and blend, and there's an intense, tactile sense of how these characters have changed each other's lives. There's also something piercing in its lovingly detailed portrait of how, as co-writer-producer-lead actor Bob McGrath puts it, "Our generation has managed to take the idea of youthfulness way beyond any attractiveness." (At first, the film's life-worn characters give the impression of being vagrants with apartments.)

While Saunders is not disclosing the exact figures, "Headhunter's Sister" is low-low budget, a good-looking blowup directly from Betacam video to 35mm. Saunders, a professional video editor, used four different editing systems -- including three he was able to use for free.