: The story of an Iraqi refugee trying to hide from a war going on in his homeland for many years. On the way to Europe, he overcomes many difficulties, meets both friends and enemies. His adventures are a real modern "odyssey."

The main character Saad explains that his name means “hope” in Persian and “sad” in English. He is horrified by his own status of an illegal migrant, a stranger everywhere who cannot extend his family, so as not to produce illegal immigrants.

1

Baghdad from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The hero lives in a happy large family of a librarian. Seeing the arbitrariness and lawlessness happening in the country, eleven-year-old Saad vows to fight against the bloody dictator.

To protect his son from the suspicion of the special services, his father, a well-educated intellectual, introduces him to reading the world classics, banned by the regime. Thus, the hero avoids brainwashing, which is usual for the youth of the country. Over time, his older sisters get married, have children.

In 1990, the UN imposed restrictive sanctions on the outbreak of war against Bahrain. This provokes hunger, epidemics, poverty, inflation, the flight of intelligentsia from the country. Sisters of Saad become widows, their children die from disease. The family is in great need, the hero is trying to earn as much as he can. He is considering emigration.

2

Saad is a university student and joins an opposition underground organization whose goal is to kill Hussein. After September 11, 2001, President Bush promises to take revenge on the Islamists, and Iraqis fear a US invasion of the country.

Unlike his revolutionary friends who hate the United States (which is cultivated by the regime), Saad looks forward to the war, considering it liberating for his homeland. He hides his expectations from friends, criticizes himself for defeatism, but he can not hide anything from Leila, the girl whom she secretly in love with. A future lawyer, she is also from an intelligent large family.

Students consider the dictatorship destructive, they argue a lot about the post-war future.

After unsuccessful searches by UN experts in the country of nuclear weapons, in 2003 the US army attacked Iraq. Saad and Leila admit to each other in love. Their feeling blooms in besieged Baghdad. After a short siege, occupying American troops enter the city, the people rejoice and destroy the statues of the despot. In euphoria from freedom, the hero visits his beloved and discovers that her house was bombed by enemy aircraft. Neighbors claim that the girl died.

3

Saad has long been depressed, not noticing the outbreak of civil war in the country. The Shiite minority, once oppressed by the Sunnis, led by Hussein, seeks power with the support of the occupation administration. The country is seized with fear of terrorist threats from which civilians suffer.

Shortly after the war, the last two son-in-law of a hero die from a suicide bombing, and his beloved father - from a crazy American bullet, right before his eyes. The young man is cruelly disappointed in the winners, only unhappy women and children remain in his family. Saada begins to visit the ghost of his father.

The guy leaves school and works, trying to feed his mother, sisters and nephews. He becomes attached to the six-year-old niece Salma. Carrying food to work for him, the girl is injured and falls ill with blood poisoning. Saad carries her to an American hospital, but help is late; Salma dies in his arms. Mother and sisters persuade the hero to emigrate - from abroad he can help them with money.

4

The ghost of the father tells the hero that you can leave the country by selling yourself.First, Saad finds a terrorist recruiter in the mosque and tries to join them. But the ghost of his father clarifies that he advised him to become a smuggler, not a suicide bomber.

A distant acquaintance introduces Saad to speculating in antiques, which are many in post-war Iraq, since all museums are looted with the connivance of the Americans. Before leaving, the mother gives her son a blanket.

5

With two partners, the hero makes his way to Egypt to sell stolen antiques. The ghost of the father invariably accompanies the son, giving valuable advice. He mentions the Odyssey and Ulysses as a symbol of the future wanderer son.

On the way, it turns out that along with antiques, the team also carries drugs. Crossing the Red Sea, drug couriers find themselves in Egypt. There Saad enjoys the peace of peaceful Cairo, spends the last money. At the UN refugee office, the hero meets a young black man, Buba, and learns that he will have to wait six months to receive an appointment. A new friend arranges for Saad overnight and illegal work.

6

Saad works as a gigolo in dance, and Buba works as his pimp. In the afternoon he listens to the revelations of middle-aged female clients, and in the evenings - the stories of illegal Africans about the unbearable life in their homeland from which they are fleeing.

Before being admitted to the UN Commissariat, Buba advises the hero to lie and pretend to be a victim of political repression, as economic migrants are not given refugee status and are not allowed into Europe. Naive Saad plans to tell the truth, as his father taught.

7

Finally, he is received by a UN official. According to her, the refugee status will be denied to the hero, because in Iraq there is no more war or dictatorship; The United States has freed the people and is helping them build a democratic state.

Saad offers Bube illegal access to England. It seems to the hero that he hates the Arab world and its Arab origin. He still does not know that for Europeans he will forever remain only an Arab and will never become his own.

8-9

Buba decides to join the staff of the touring Swedish punk band Sirens and with their help get to Europe. With artists, fugitives infiltrate Libya, where they plan to board a ship to Italy. Heroes see how the Libyan police, by order of Gaddafi, does not stand on ceremony with illegal immigrants, preventing those from reaching the borders of Europe.

On a boat of smugglers crowded with refugees for a lot of money, Saad and Buba sail to Malta, where border guards arrest the boat. The fugitives throw away their documents so that they are not expelled to their homeland.

In Malta, the heroes live in a refugee camp and depict amnesia during interrogations so that the police do not know where they came from. Seeing a prophetic dream, Saad decides to escape.

10

Crossing in a fragile boat to Sicily, the fugitives fall into a storm; they are thrown into the open sea. Saad has kept Buba afloat for a long time, but the waves push them away from each other.

The ashore unconscious hero is found by a local teacher, the beautiful Vittoria. She organizes a rescue operation, but the Sicilians find in the sea only a handful of survivors. Vittoria settles the unfortunate at home. The hero is called Ulysses, hiding his name and past.

From the identification of drowned refugees, Saad recognizes Bubu. Heartbroken, Vittoria consoles him, the heroes draw closer. The girl is also a fugitive, she once left home due to the terrorist activities of her parents and became a teacher in order to bring up only the good in children.

Saad again communicates with the ghost of his father, and he explains that he is a tormented soul, unable to leave the earth while his son is in trouble. As long as the son has problems, the father will be there.

From loneliness, the hero becomes discouraged, and only Vittoria, who sympathizes with him, supports him with the strength to live. By chance, the guy finds out that the girl is terminally ill and dies. Out of gratitude, Saad remains with her, but his heart is deaf to feelings.

11

Vittoria sets the date of the wedding, the young man agrees for a look.Having taken away the amulet - the mother’s cover, which he found on the shore after a storm, the hero secretly leaves the bride by writing her a penitent letter. In it, he thanks her and confesses his love to another woman who died. The ghost father criticizes his son for this hasty decision, but the hero is sure that his fate in London - an inexplicable force draws him there.

In the port, Saad meets an African Leopold, a philosopher and a womanizer. He is sure that Europeans are two-faced, aggressive, unfair to strangers and deserve illegal migration from third world countries. The African helps the hero secretly get into the ferry going to Italy.

12

Arriving in Naples, Saad looks at the situation and realizes that the mafia is engaged in illegal activities. To pay carriers for delivery to the English Channel, the young man settles in with bandits - he steals. A few months later he earns to pay for the road. Sheltered in a cramped truck, along with many migrants, he is being transported across European borders. The customs trip is interrupted by customs officers, finding refugees in the back. The driver is hiding, they are not trying to detain him, and the migrants are arrested.

During interrogation, Saad is called Ulysses, associating himself with the hero of the Odyssey. Sitting in prison, illegal immigrants read fresh newspapers: in them the capture of migrants is presented as a great achievement of law enforcement agencies, as an act of humanism. No one sympathizes with the unfortunate, fleeing from wars, robbed and deceived by bandits, who almost died on the way due to inhuman conditions. Overwhelmed by rage, Saad expresses these considerations to the customs officer who is questioning him, and he, imbued with sympathy, helps him to escape.

13

Lying in a ditch and looking up at the sky, Saad discusses the vicissitudes of fate, which turned him and his compatriots into nothing and spared the indifferent Europeans, although not at all. In his opinion, prosperous Europeans hate migrants because they demonstrate to them who they could become in an unenviable set of circumstances.

On the advice of the ghost father, Saad enters France under the bottom of the truck. In a border village, he meets association activists fighting for refugee rights. Their leader Max and his wife Odile help the hero. Max takes the young man to the northeast, to Dr. Schelker; for the first time the hero moves around Europe with comfort. He is fascinated by France and is puzzled that, according to the driver, the people are always dissatisfied with something and are on strike.

Discussing once again with his father about the “equality and brotherhood” of all people, the hero declares: “I dream that“ we ”, which I will utter one day, would mean a community of smart people striving for peace.”

Shelter Shelter, Dr. Schelker, is the “mayor of the dead,” the caretaker of the cemetery for victims of the First World War. He argues about wars and borders that destroy and divide people into their own and enemies, and adds that he does not recognize the dividing boundaries and helps the hero out of humanistic considerations.

The doctor brings the young man to the English Channel, the next activist, Polina, tells him about the atrocities of the police and the lawlessness of illegal immigrants - the British carefully protect their borders.

14

Thinking how to get to England, and wandering in despair along the beach, Saad suddenly sees the ghost of Leila. His father convinces him that this is not a spirit, and the separated lovers finally meet.

Leila tells her sad story of wandering. During the bombing of NATO troops, her family survived and, taking the opportunity, emigrated. Parents tragically died on the road, and the girl got to France. Here she worked illegally and was waiting for paperwork for refugee status. After the local elections, in which immigrants were declared the main French evil, she lost her job and slipped into poverty. Now the heroine hopes to somehow get to England.

Leila brings Saad to a refugee camp, and happy heroes live together as spouses. They are trying to earn extra money in order to survive. They are helped by a volunteer Polina, who accuses society of indifference to illegal immigrants:

This is the beginning of barbarism ... when a person does not want to see something like this in another, when someone is appointed as a subhuman, when people are sorted by grades and someone is removed from the list.

Pauline brings Saad with the dancer Jorge, who promises to deliver the lovers to England. Before their departure, the camp was smashed by the police, the young man was hiding, and the girl was arrested. Soon she was sent to Iraq. Pauline persuades the inconsolable hero to leave without a bride. Already from his homeland, Leila writes to Saad, urging him to legalize in England alone and later call her.

15

Saad lives in London, in Soho, in poverty, moonlighting, dreams of becoming a lawyer and marrying Leila. Despite his ambivalent feelings for the city, he likes it here. He still leads philosophical conversations with his father, criticizing him for his book, idealistic view of the world:

Writers are charlatans. They want to give us peace, giving it away for what it is not - for the world is right, fair, honest. Continuous sell!

The father convinces the hero that the real writers, Homer, who invented Ulysses, "... paint the world not as it is, but as what people could make it."

Saad is full of optimism about the future: “I ... will build my house outside my homeland, in a foreign land ... His [Ulysses] odyssey was full of nostalgia, mine is a start filled with the future. ... The purpose of the trip ... is to lower the travel bag and say: I have come. So, I declare ...: I will not go further, I have come. "