As the film opens, a ninety-year-old Louis van Gasteren—a documentary filmmaker and artist famed in the Netherlands—is seated in a video editing suite, watching scenes of himself in the 1960s, a time when “anything was possible.” He reflects on how much he has changed, and that he is that same person and yet is not.
The opening titles appear over scenes of farm workers stacking hay.
The film opens in 1900 when Tom Grimwood as a boy leaves his family cottage carrying his trunk to take a job on a farm for a weekly wage of 2/6 plus keep.
Filmed in the director's hometown over the course of a single growing season, the film follows how the price of onions affects the lives of two young villagers who wish to wed, while the father of the would-be bride, Yaro, struggles to make enough from his crop to be able to offer his daughter a fitting marriage.
To Live for the Masses is divided into four parts, each narrating Joseph Estrada's childhood, acting career and life as a politician, with the fourth part dedicated to events leading to and surrounding the 2001 EDSA Revolution as narrated from his point of view.