Like the classic girl’s novels its title evokes—think Anne of Green Gables or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm—the mesmerizing Marina of the Zabbaleen develops a timeless theme: how the world looks through a child’s eyes. It’s hard to imagine, however, how Anne or Rebecca might have fared in a precarious neighborhood of Egyptian garbage pickers. Though Marina unfolds amid some of the toughest circumstances to be found in the world’s cities, the film’s strength is a profound regard for the imagination and insight of children.

Filmed over the course of seven months in Cairo, the documentary follows seven year-old Marina, the only daughter of a family of farmers turned garbage pickers. If Egypt had a caste system, these would be the untouchables; members of the Coptic Christian minority, the Zabbaleen squat at the margins of the city, making their living by raising pigs and collecting Cairo’s trash. They are a community of survivors. In one of the film’s more arresting scenes, Marina peers from a crowd as a tattoo artist inks a cross onto the wrist of a screaming baby. This Coptic tradition, explains the artist, dates from Roman times, when the mark ensured that even if a child’s parents were martyred, their cultural identity would remain intact. Director Engi Wassef, herself a Copt, was born in Cairo and moved with her family to New York at the age of seven. After graduating from Harvard in 2002, she did a stint at Goldman Sachs before enrolling in the graduate film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. At a screening of her documentary last week, she told the audience that she had been filming another family in the Zabbaleen neighborhood when she spotted Marina and her brother outside a store. “They looked like angels to me,” she said.

A magnetic little girl, garrulous and bright-eyed, Marina leads an exceptional life; in a community where entire families rise before dawn to collect garbage, Marina’s mother has vowed to keep her daughter in school. Marina and her brothers constantly play with the camera—in one montage they peer into the lens through the sole of a broken sneaker. Yet harsher realities crowd around. We see women pick through a bag of hospital waste, used syringes falling on their bare feet. Later, Marina has a tooth pulled without anesthetic at a government-run clinic. It is hard to believe that things will get better for Marina, only worse.

Though Wassef tries to provide some context about the privatization of Cairo’s waste system, Marina of the Zabbaleen is not overtly political. Still, the Egyptian government has refused to allow Wassef to screen her film in that country.

Marina of the Zabbaleen plays at AMC Loews Theater on 19th St., New York, on May 3; at Village East Cinemas at 181-189 2nd Ave., New York, on May 4; and at the Cannes Film Festival, May 23.

See marianathemovie.com for details.