Sheherazade is promised to a powerful Sultan as a gift in exchange for free passage to the Holy Land. When the Sultan's underling saves her from certain death, she falls madly in love with her hero.

A recalcitrant thief vies with a duplicitous Mongol ruler for the hand of a beautiful princess.

Zaman is a sweet and sad story about love and devotion, hope and fear. Zaman (Sami Kaftan), and his wife, Najma (Shatha Salim), have built their happy life together in their house of reeds and, though childless, adopted a boy, Yacine (Hussein Imad), orphaned by the 1991 Gulf War. They have lived a quiet, contented existence until Najma falls ill. The local doctor tells them she needs surgery or some special medicine he does not have. And so Zaman sets off in his small boat and journeys up the Tigris to Baghdad in search of the precious cure. Thus begins the journey of salvation and discovery for "Zaman, the Man of the Reeds."