Over a period of six years, director Arash Rakhsha followed the friends Hamid and Yasser as they smuggled goods without customs clearance across the dangerous border between Iran and Iraq. Rakhsha, who once worked as a kolbar himself, brings particular sensitivity to his debut, revealing these individuals’ dignity and resilience and the ways in which they confront social and economic marginalisation and political neglect. While its powerful visual language resembles that of a fiction film, its gaze remains consistently observational. The result is an intimate and credible record of the survival strategies of Kurdish existence – and the price they exact.