"Gabbeh" opens with an old Iranian woman and her husband, leaving their house to go to the stream to wash their gabbeh, a nomadic rug that has a scene showing a man and woman riding tandem on a horse across the grasslands. The old man imagines himself in love with the woman he sees woven into the rug and calls to her and the young woman suddenly appears and begins to tell her story of love, loss and longing.

A young girl and her mother earn a meager living working at a local hospital in a war-ravaged town in Afghanistan until the Taliban shut down the hospital and forbid women to hold jobs or even leave their homes without an adult male relative chaperone.

The girl, her mother and her grandmother have lost all their male relatives in the war so, in desperation, the mother disguises her daughter as a boy named "Osama" and finds a job for her with a local merchant. All seem well until the Taliban come through town, forcibly recruiting young boys for madrassa. Osama is caught up in the Taliban dragnet and with great difficulty manages to hide the truth of her sex until she is betrayed by the inescapable fact of her own biology and the onset of adolescence.

Osama can be viewed as a political fable. Afghanistan, like Osama, has disguised itself in order to survive in the modern world. It has taken on the trappings of a modern liberal state, but, as Osama could never hide forever the fact that she was a girl growing into young womanhood, the truth of Afghanistan's nature as a collection of competing tribes with little regard for any central government is always lying beneath the surface and can never be permanently hidden.

A young Druze woman from the Golan Heights has been engaged by her family to marry a television actor from Damascus, a man she has never met. Because she is from the disputed territory, the Israeli government considers her "stateless" and when she goes to Damascus to take up her life there, she will be considered a Syrian citizen and ineligible for a visa to enter Israel, so she will never be able to see her family again.

Life for the the young woman's family is complex. The woman's father, a political dissident, has just been released from prison by the Israeli government. Her brother, who has been living in Russia, has married a Russian woman and has a son by her...the village elders are scandalized and have threatened to cut off the whole family if he comes to the wedding.

"The Syrian Bride" is a story of love, conflict and divided loyalty. Through the course of the film, every member of the family has a difficult choice to make and must in the end decide which is the most valuable alternative.