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 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.