Under the baking sun and his father’s beady eye, Sicilian pre-teen Oscar scavenges for scrap metal on a mountainside. Among the piles of rubbish, he chances upon a statue of the Virgin Mary. Closer to the sea, young Nigerian immigrant Stanley mops a church floor.

This intimate observational documentary explores poverty in Sicily from two different vantage points, drawing poetic connections between lives that don’t appear to touch. Both, for example, have absent mothers. A close-up of Stanley swimming and a tracking shot of Oscar doing a wheelie along a dirt road are just as resonant, uniting the boys in private snatches of joy as well as trauma.

• In cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema