Starring Alejandro Polanco and Isamar Gonzales. Unrated. Plays Friday to Wednesday, August 22 to 27, at the Vancity Theatre

It could be somewhere in Mexico City, or maybe on a distant edge of Kuala Lumpur, but the action in Chop Shop is found in a part of New York City that few people would recognize as America today.

The ability to make quiet observations without forcing too many conclusions—or metaphors—is among the central strengths of this second outing for Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani. (His debut film, 2005’s Man Push Cart, was about a Pakistani vendor in Manhattan.) It helps that he has such an affecting first-time actor in Alejandro Polanco, who plays 12-year-old Alejandro, a school-free Latino kid surviving admirably in the tough Iron Triangle—a zone of dirt-cheap car-repair places lining unpaved streets in the shadow of Shea Stadium.

Ale is the kind of kid who would do well anywhere, given the smallest encouragement. But he has grown up on his own, with occasional help, if not much guidance, from his pretty older sister (Isamar Gonzales). When she comes to share the tiny space he has carved out in the back of a local chop shop, he develops some notion of their future as independent entrepreneurs—a vision brutally blurred when he discovers how she augments the meagre wage she gets working for a local lunch wagon.

Fortunately, the conflicts don’t get much bigger than that. Crime—especially the violent kind—remains present but hardly intrudes on the much simpler drama of a rudimentary family struggling for something more than survival. Bahrani doesn’t sweeten his scenes with soundtrack music or sentimentality; his subjects are rewarded for their on-screen honesty by how much we come to care about what happens to them after the camera stops rolling.