Aboozar Amini

Afghani refugee Ali and his brother have just arrived in Turkey where, surrounded by many other refugees, his family tries to build a new life. The boys earn their living shining shoes. When one day their spot has been taken, their fragile existence and dreams of a better future hang by a thread.

The film is a sobering, intimate and warm account of daily life in Kabul during the silent intervals between suicide bombings. The bombings that happened, and those that will, define life for the film's characters; a father who works as a bus driver, and two young boys whose policeman father is away due to murder threats.

An illegal immigrant is reminded of his origin by the melodies of an instrument of his birthplace Bumiyan, Afganistan. However, the musician playing the instrument claims that the melodies aren't from Bumiyan, but from Kurdistan. But where is Kurdistan?

A devoted soldier of the Taliban's ideology that has shaped his destiny since birth, Samim (23) struggles between the alluring promises of martyrdom and the mundanity of his daily existence as a husband and farmer. Samim's younger brother, Rafi (14), idolizes his big brother as he navigates the confusion of adolescence, leaving behind playfulness to enter a world shaped by decades of military intervention and resulting radicalization.