A beautiful film about the everyday life of a boy coming of age living with his prostitute mother, saving money, dreaming of a bicycle.

As in his earlier films, this uncompromising Iranian director works through repetition, his style so unemphatic that the slightest modulation (the same action seen from different perspectives, for instance) carries a charge. Saless' camera simply fastens, in long, uninflected takes, on the daily rountine of a Turkish worker in Berlin, a Gastarbeiter like any other. We see him at his job, a dedicated prisoner to his monotonous machine; travelling home on the underground, where only a drunk will talk to him; walking home to the shabby room he shares with other Turkish workers, and where he ocasionally writes letters home and regularly counts his money. The determined austerity has an almost mesmeric effect; and seems almost too calculated until one begins to feel the enervating isolation of these mortgaged lives. For all that the foregin worker tries to engage with his adopted city (and he does try, inarticulately but with an innocent single-mindedness), he might just as well have come from another planet." David Wilson, "Sighe and Sound"