The arid Central Asian steppe. Ali and his son collect dead sheep. The boy misses his mother who has been out of touch since leaving for a better life in Moscow. They decide to find her. The big city offers them the fate of the gastarbeiter: occasional income and a hand-to-mouth existence. Ali speaks to the police, contacts the Uzbek community, and tirelessly makes the rounds from kiosk to hospital to market. And he patiently bears all insults. The film unfolds journalistically, documenting without bias the lifestyle and livelihood of a man on the edge, in foreign surroundings that essentially force him to communicate intuitively. Just as he fails to notice dramatic world events reported on the television news, the outside world doesn't notice his internal drama. He's merely goods on the work market, likened to trees cut down by an ingenious machine that removes the branches and bark, and then cuts up the bare trunks into preset lengths. And the chips fly....