Afghanistan produces roughly 90 percent of the world's opiates, but the film's real subject is what heroin has done inside the country itself, where more than a million people are now classed as problem drug users. Director Darius Bazargan and reporter Tahir Qadiri follow two young addicts, Jawad and Babrak, as they try to get clean and rebuild their lives against a backdrop of war and poverty. The camera stays close on their daily routines, the relapses, the family tension, and the makeshift efforts at treatment available in a country with little addiction infrastructure. Narrator Tina Daheley frames the scale of the crisis, but the film's weight comes from the two men's own accounts of how they started using and what keeping clean actually costs them day to day. There is no tidy resolution offered; the film ends with both men still fighting the same habit it opened with, which is closer to the truth of addiction than most accounts allow.