A film about refuse workers might not sound like the most enticing prospect – but writer and director Mai Iskander manages to make rubbish and recycling pretty riveting in 'Garbage Dreams'.

Actually, it's the young people he focuses on who make this documentary come alive – and their plight in a rapidly changing world.

Adham, Osama and Nabil are teenage boys growing up in Mokottam – a huge "garbage village" in Cairo, a city of 18 million people with no state-run waste disposal system.

They have been born into the 60,000-strong Zaballeen, a class of indigenous Egyptian people who collect residents' trash and make their scant living by reusing and recycling what they pick up.

But the Zaballeen's way of life is threatened due to the city's authorities bringing in foreign refuse disposal companies to carry out the work. The change could have a devastating impact on the Zaballeen, who, despite their lowly status in society, believe they were born to pick up rubbish.

The three teenage boys accept their fate in different ways – Adham dreams of owning a recycling factory, Nabil wants to start married life with his fiancée but must have a home of his own first, and Osama bounces from job to job, aware that he's disappointing those around him but unable to stick at anything. "I'm had many careers," the 16-year-old says.

Trying to help them is Laila, a Zaballeen community social worker turned activist who has helped set up a recycling school and is determined that her people won't lose their livelihood.

Laila has no desire to leave Mokottam, essentially a vast dump full of hungry people, because, as she says: "I'm exactly like a fish who can't live without my sea."

The film highlights the fact that the Zaballeen have been doing for decades what has lately become so popular – attempting to waste nothing.

Their 80 percent recycling rate would far surpass most developed nations – and, indeed, when Adham and Nabil get to take a busman's holiday to Wales, that's exactly what they find. The film is really touching in parts: in one scene, Adham sits in his bleak Mokottam home, listening to a tape of music he brought home from Wales. The overseas visit has undoubtedly broadened his horizons – and given him a taste for something he is all too aware he may not be able to attain.

Osama, meanwhile, struggles to be the man he knows he must become – and speaks endearingly of a time in the future when he is sure he will be liked.

The final scene of the trio dancing in Cairo, filmed several years after the three boys were first interviewed by Iskander, is beautiful and moving: proving that even when life is extremely hard, it can be sweet.

9.15 p.m. tonight