i have no idea, now, how i got onto this film. i wish i knew. ramin bahrani visits some of the same haunted post-traumatic territory touched upon in red road, and it seems to me he may possibly do it with even greater focus. ahmad is a young pakistani man with a push cart and a stack of porn dvds in nyc. very early every morning he takes his push cart from the depot where it’s housed to his allotted spot on the sidewalk, by hand. after work he sells his dvds to people he meets on the street. the pulling of the cart in the liminal area between the large, heavy trafficked, still nocturnal new york avenue and the sidewalk is harrowing and, on occasion, heartbreaking, especially because bahrani puts it squarely at the center of his film and shows it to us over and over and over (it also puts one in mind of those films one has seen about subcontinental streets, full of lawless traffic and the constant threat of being run over: except, wrong time, wrong place). the light is orange-brownish and there are mostly taxis about. ahmad looks like the loneliest man in new york. Continue reading man push cart