We tend to overlook the Ottoman Empire’s role in World War I. In this country, at least, we generally focus on the Western Front, on the shell-shocked young men dying in muddy trenches remembered in Wilfred Owen’s poetry. When we do remember the Ottoman role in the Great War, we remember it not from their perspective, but from the colonial one: We remember David Lean’s epic 1962 adventure film Lawrence of Arabia.

In that sense, Theeb, Jordan’s first-ever Oscar nominee and British-Jordanian director Naji Abu Nowar’s debut film, is an inversion of Lawrence of Arabia—a film told from the perspective of Arab bedouins rather than colonial adventurers, a scrappy coming of age story rather than a grand tale of epic, colonial ambitions. It takes place in southern Jordan in 1916—the same year in which Lawrence of Arabia is set, and owes a great deal, especially its stunning cinematography, to Lean’s film. But while World War I, the collapsing Ottoman Empire, and the incursion of modernity are all central to the film’s themes and development, Theeb’s appeal is that it takes place almost entirely in the margins of empire and war.

While the war rages elsewhere, the small Bedouin community at the center of Theeb is more concerned with the advent of the locomotive, which is threatening their traditional livelihood of guiding pilgrims through the hostile desert. Eleven-year-old Theeb (Jacir Eid) is the youngest of three sons, the older of whom are both guides. Theeb is immediately introduced as an insatiably curious boy, a kind of bedouin Calvin (sans Hobbes) who can’t help but get himself into trouble as his older brothers try to teach him how to be a man.

War finally makes it into the remote desert in the form of a British officer (Jack Fox), who is traveling with an Arab ally on a secret mission involving a mysterious wooden box. When his brother, Hussein (Hussein Salameh, Eid’s cousin in real life), leaves with the British soldier, Theeb sets off without permission behind him, flies buzzing about his head. He catches up with them at a well, but things quickly turn sour. When the Englishman goes for a drink, he finds only blood. There are bodies in the well.

After a series of bandit attacks, Theeb is the only one left alive. But he’s stranded. Even if he knew the way to the next well, he wouldn’t make it alone. Help does come, finally, but in the badly wounded form of one of the bandits who attacked their party. Theeb is faced with an obvious dilemma: He needs help to escape the desert, but the only way he can get help is by helping the man who killed his brother. The rest of the movie follows the strained relationship between the odd couple, simultaneously suspicious of and utterly dependent on one another, as they travel to a railway station to sell the box the Englishman was carrying to the Ottomans.