Slowly is his walking up the stairs towards his flat. One step, another one, the same slowly waltz throughout the the way. It´s the beginning of the movie, it´s the stage and almost an entire world.
The old men´s name is Abu Raed, living in a poor area of Amman, the capital of Jordan, and working at the international airport of the city as cleaner. Loneliness is the major power in his life, his wife died four years ago and his son, as he tells Nour later in the movie, fell into death as a young child. Nour on the other hand descend from a wealthy family as is working as a pilot. As she is in her early 30´s, her parents desperately looking for a husband for her.
The plot ist starting when Abu Raed get to own a pilots cap by accident, which he starts to wear on his way back home. Tareq, a boy from the neighborhood, thinks that he´s a real pilot and wants to hear all of his adventures. After beeing sceptical in the beginning, Abu Raed starts to enjoy his new role and tells wild stories to the children of the neighborhood. Captain Abu Raed was born.
Even though the movie seems to focus on Abu Raed and his life as a pilot, the movie is really more about to boys, Tareq, the boy who „explored“ him, and Murad, a bit older and a direct neighboor of Abu Raed. His father is an alcoholic and beats him, his brother and foremost his mother. Sceptical over stories told by grown-ups, Murad tries to show that Abu Raed is a liar. He manages to do so by inviting some of the boys to a ride to the airport, where they saw him, laying on the floor to clean it.
While Abu Raed is slowly building a friendship with Nour the pilot, he tries to help Tareq and Murad. Tareq is forced to sale sweets on the street instead of going to the school. Abu Raed is buying them time and again to send the boy back to school. But his plan backfires. His father now thinks that Tareq is a genius salesman and gives him more and more responsibility, until he can´t go back to school at all. Murad on the other hand suffers under his father´s alcohol abuse and violence, and after he burned his son´s hand with a hot spoon, Abu Raed decides that he has to save the familie. First he is sending the police to them, but they can´t find anything. A bit later he meets the father laying on the ground after drinking way to much, but he can´t force himself to his initiall idea to kill him with a rock.
In the end, he made a plan to bring the woman and the kids away with the help of Nour, so that the father won´t find them. Abu Raed is waiting for the father, trying to help him. But he doesn´t want to hear about it, and the last thing we see is the father, beating on him with a slugger.
The last scene of the movie shows Murad as a grown up man, standing in front of a window in the airport, now the captain that Abu Raed never was.
Captain Abu Raed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDMbwbS5eog
Simon Dierich 