"When I drive around the streets of Manila, I don't remember by place, landmarks. I remember crime scenes," says photojournalist Raffy Lerma in the opening minutes of the documentary The Nightcrawlers. This evening, he arrives at a wake for a 15-year-old boy, shot twice in the head and once in the neck the night before. The boy's father and uncle stand grieving over the open casket as neighbors mill around.

"Every day you cover these scenes. It chips away at your humanity," he says. "But it's more important to cover these killings than to do nothing at all."

Lerma is one of a small group of journalists, known by some as the Nightcrawlers of Manila, committed to documenting the drug war in