Man Push Cart

Ramin Bahrani's first film follows a Pakistani immigrant selling coffee and bagels from a pushcart in Manhattan. Ahmad, played by Ahmad Razvi, drags the heavy cart through the streets before dawn, sets up on the same corner, sells, and hauls it back at night. The next day, the same. Bahrani has said his source was Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus: the man who pushes the rock up the hill, watches it roll back down, and pushes it again. The whole form of the film is built to that cycle. There is no dramatic escalation and no resolution, only repetition. The fact that Ahmad was a well-known rock singer in Pakistan is what gives the film its weight. His wife has died, he is not permitted to see his son, and his past is only recalled to him when someone happens to recognise him. It screened at Venice in September 2005 and opened in the United States on 16 October 2006, and is counted among the films that marked the return of neorealism to American independent cinema. Who it is for: viewers who value slow, observational realism and immigrant stories. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for plot or an emotional peak, which the film withholds deliberately.