A low-budget sleeper that has garnered several major festival awards, Dragon Chow is My Beautiful Laundrette without the bubbles: a deceptively spare and elegant, black-and-white evocation of life among West Germany's Asian Gastarbeiter, or guest workers. The film's hero is a doe-eyed Pakistani named Shezad (Bhasker), who arrives in Hamburg to partake of the economic miracle only to find himself trapped in a seedy welfare hotel and living at the whim of con men and capricious immigration authorities. Landing an illegal job in the kitchen of a second-rate restaurant, the resourceful Shezad cooks up a scheme with a Chinese waiter, Xiao, to open a restaurant of their own. (After a humorously-staged cookoff among friends, they opt for a Pakistani joint.) "For all its culinary scenes," writes Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, "Dragon Chow's sense of naturalism is less kitchen-sink than austerely contemplative. The action generally unfolds at night in a cold, alienating Germany characterized by a sense of isolation and order...Dragon Chow is anecdotal but each event, no matter how banal, has tremendous retroactive weight." Jan Schôte effectively narrows his world to the polyglot community of the Gastarbeiter (the characters variously speak Urdu, Mandarin, Swahili and Gujarati), evoking their complete alienation from their hostile hosts. Language here is not so much a barrier as a talisman, to protect against the self-loathing that is the by-product of the promised land's bitter fruits.