Sisyphus, Making It Work on the Streets of New York

Man Push Cart - Movies - Review - New York Times: "Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), the Pakistani immigrant who is the protagonist of Ramin Bahrani’s “Man Push Cart,” goes through a Sisyphean daily grind. In the wee small hours of each morning, he commutes by subway from his shabby one-room apartment in Brooklyn to Midtown Manhattan, where he sells coffee, doughnuts and bagels on the street.

Partly inspired by “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Albert Camus’s treatise on the absurdity of existence. Ahmad finds a stray kitten and impulsively brings it home. But as tenderly as he feels toward his pet, which becomes a surrogate for his son, he has little idea of how to care for it. Filmed in less than three weeks, “Man Push Cart” is an exemplary work of independent filmmaking carried out on a shoestring.