Plot

Acclaimed director Abolfazl Jalili offers a compassionate story of a young Afghan refugee who lives illegally in Iran. Young Kaim drifts to the Delbaran crossing on the Afghan-Iran border, where he finds work at a coffee shop frequented by truck drivers. He feels at home in this small oasis of friendliness, though the sounds of war can be heard in the background, violent bandits prowl the roads, and opium is everywhere. As we watch Kaim run from one task to another day after day, we soon realize that we are watching a boy who is being cheated out of his childhood.

In the Iranian border town of Delbaran, a fourteen-year-old Afghan refugee lives with an Iranian couple, helping them run their roadside tavern—a regular stop for a colorful assortment of truck drivers, merchants, and opium smokers. Kaim is the agent through which we see the world of illegal Afghan laborers, the Iranian police who hunt them down, and adults who take desperate measures to survive in this dangerous landscape. The barren, red-toned beauty of the surrounding desert, a succession of broken-down vehicles, the sounds of automatic weapons from the nearby civil war, and the recurring image of a young boy running are the elements that form the backdrop to this spare study of the rigors of political exile, painted in rapid brush strokes. Abolfazl Jalili, Iran’s poet of social realism, was trained as a painter and calligrapher before turning to cinema: here, as he sketches the repetitive minutiae of daily life, a wry and unexpected humor emerges and moments of human decency break through the harshest of circumstances.

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