Survival is the theme of this heartwarming film about the Kurds, a poor people of million who have no homeland and are located in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. A fascinating realistic look at the Iranian Kurds living in a wintry border town in the rugged mountain passes on the Iranian side of the nearby northern Iraqui border.
The film is about the plight of a family to save their crippled brother, someone they all love greatly. The youngsters must forget their childhood and assume their roles as adults. The year-old Iranian Kurd director, Mr. He sets the film in Sardab, the Kurdish village where he was born, as he becomes the first Iranian Kurd director and this film the first done in Kurdish. The main villager occupation is in the dangerous business of smuggling goods by mule across valleys strewn with landmines and roads where bandits lay ambushes, and they also fear the foreboding searches by military patrols.
There are five young Iranian Kurdish children at home: Amaneh, an adolescent girl; Ayoub, her brother, who is 12 and acts as the head of the family; Rojine who is the oldest teenager and now acts as the mother; Kolsoom the little girl most recently born; and Madi, their year-old brother, a non-speaking crippled dwarf with a fragile and twisted body and an expressively sad face, who is dying from an incurable disease and is being treated with pills and injections by the local doctor and tender loving care by his brothers and sisters.
The children go to town everyday to work at menial jobs such as wrapping glasses for commercial trade, or carrying heavy loads to the marketplace.
They work to eat, being in an impoverished place there is no regard for child labor exploitations or is there a high value placed on education. The family has no money to get the operation in Iran, but Ayoub gets the dangerous adult work as a smuggler so he can save up enough money to get Madi the operation in Iraq.
