In 1980s Jeddah, Salma is a privileged, rebellious girl from a wealthy Saudi family, raised by a strict mother weighed down by grief and a loving father who is rarely home from work. Gamar is a young Sudanese man who has left his own family behind to earn a living in Jeddah, driving Salma to and from her day-to-day activities. At first, their relationship follows the simple rules of employer and employee, but it quickly grows into an intimate friendship that bonds them through her teenage years and beyond. Then, as Salma gets older and starts to take the wheel, that friendship is put to the test.

Ahd Kamel’s first feature as director was inspired by her own childhood, and by Mohi, the Sudanese driver who was there from the day she was born, accompanied her through childhood and adolescence, and became her closest confidant, despite every difference of age, gender and nationality that society placed between them. Moving through the 1980s and 90s, it is a tender, deeply personal coming-of-age story about finding family in the most unexpected places, and about a man who may have been driving her car, but who ultimately helped her take the wheel of her own life.