On December 20, 1987, five days before Christmas, the passenger ferry Dona Paz collided with the oil tanker Vector off Mindoro Island in the Philippines. The ferry was licensed to carry about 1,500 people but was carrying far more for the holiday rush, and the collision and fire that followed killed an estimated 4,000 passengers and crew, making it the worst peacetime maritime disaster in history, deadlier than the Titanic. The film reconstructs the sinking through survivor and rescuer interviews, archival footage and photographs, and a reenactment of the collision itself, tracing how a ferry packed beyond capacity met a tanker running without a proper lookout in the dark. Transcripts from the Philippine congressional inquiry supply the official account of what went wrong, from overcrowding to the failures of both crews, while the survivors describe the chaos of fire spreading across water slicked with spilled fuel. The film's case is that this catastrophe, largely unknown outside Asia, deserves the same scrutiny as history's more famous shipwrecks.