Right from the opening moments as a pair of scavenging children save a dog from being burned alive by a young mob ?Stray Dogs? is gripping and uncompromising.

For the rest of the 93 minutes the viewer is forced to deal with the uncomfortable truths of what children suffer when their fathers go off to play hero in the wars.

Set in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban it follows Zahed and his sister Gol Ghoti whose sole ambition is to find enough food to eat and to stay with their imprisoned mother at night.

She faces a death sentence if her husband, locked up in another jail, rules she should be executed for remarrying after he ran off for five years to fight for the Taliban.

Her remarriage was primarily to support her children but instead she can only fret and worry as her offspring are forced to play go-between and negotiate a world where adults are too wrapped up in their own struggle to survive to care about yet more orphaned children.

Just when their lives seem desperate enough a new prison regime bans them from sleeping by their mother at night and they are forced to find places to sleep in a landscape even bleaker than their lives.

All in all it?s a convincing effort. Iranian writer director Marziyeh Meshkini has clearly learned a thing or two from her husband Moshen Makhmalbaf of the Makhmalbaf Film House.

She too has used non-professional actors who turn in powerful performances as the two siblings who prop each other up when the adult world has left them without even the basics of life.

As well as grabbing the emotions the film offers plenty of visual stimulus with stunning views of the Afghanistani countryside.

One of the opening scenes offers up a moonlike landscape but with strange, man-made structures unlike anything I have ever seen.

The timeless quality to Afghani living comes over forcefully with many scenes depicting a way of life scarcely unchanged for centuries.

Some of ?Straw Dogs? has a documentary feel to it including the dog fight which can hardly be anything other than reality. I doubt whether Ms Meshkini would be able to claim that no animals were harmed during the making of her film.

But clearly ?Stray Dogs? is there to make you think about the unrelenting grimness and unchanging nature of Afghani life.

The film ends abruptly with a predictable twist but by then Meshkini had already made her point leaving the cinema-goer with some lasting if uncomfortable memories.