When cinematographer Michael Simmonds asked director Ramin Bahrani to join him on his way to an auto body shop in Queens, neither knew he would be working on the location for an award-winning movie.

The Iranian-American director was awestruck by what he saw and ended up spending 1 1/2 years in that location shooting the 2007 movie "Chop Shop." Shown at last week's Asian-American film festival in Pittsburgh, the 84-minute film depicts the life of an orphan who works in an auto body repair shop.

Winner of a 2008 Independent Spirit Award, "Chop Shop" tells the story of an ambitious 12-year-old Latino orphan, Ale (Alejandro Polanco), who lives in a tiny plywood room provided by his employer, Rob (Rob Sowulski). The film, which premiered at Cannes, shows how he negotiates the hostile world of adults, where his 16-year-old sister, Isa, nicknamed Izzy (Isamar Gonzales), moonlights as a prostitute while working as a waitress in a food truck during the day.

Desperate to have a good life, Ale and Isa struggle day in day out, saving their hard-earned bucks to invest in a food truck of their own. Ale even steals money from a woman and, despite the hardships, dreams of someday making their lives better. Critics have lauded the movie for opening the eyes of New Yorkers to a grim reality taking place with the backdrop of Shea Stadium, where a billboard reads: "Make dreams happen."

"I was curious to know what dreams can happen in this place and who these dreamers were," Bahrani said in an interview with Cinema Without Borders, a Burbank, Calif.-based Web site that follows movies. "The more time I spent there, the more I was drawn to the lives of the young kids who work and live in the auto body shops."

Bahrani was amazed by the bleakness and the Latino kids' struggle for livelihood in the neighborhood dominated by immigrants, actor Ahmed Razvi, a former Pakistani rock star who has a brief role in "Chop Shop," said when discussing the movie after Sunday's screening at the Harris Theater, Downtown.

The director came up with the story, but selecting the cast was an uphill task, said Razvi, who was involved in the process. "[Bahrani] saw thousands of kids, went to school looking for Hispanic kids," he said.

Once a cast was found, several rounds of rehearsals were done to familiarize the non-professional actors and the people in the neighborhood with the presence of the camera, Razvi told the inquisitive audience at the Harris. It took two years (including six months of actual shooting) for the movie to be completed, with the surprise being Polanco. "Ale doesn't know how good he is," Razvi said.