Through an ensemble of urban vignettes that repeat and slowly evolve in the wake of life's surreal monotony, Casting draws a portrait of a conservative seaside city with a ramshackle refugee camp in its hills. Khalil is an odd-man-out film director in the midst of a complete identity crisis – lost between the home values he grew up with and the growing influence of radical religious teachings in an occupied country exposed to war. In his struggle to find himself and make a film, money problems, his half-wit assistant, unprofessional actors, and the complications of working with his childhood love, Salma, threaten to make both impossible. Khalil drags through location scouting and local castings, observing the town's mysterious and colorful characters going about their days. These portraits of the townsfolk – on the street, and in audition – present different aspects of his thought, emotion, and memory, and represent the phases of his lifelong search for truth. Against all odds, Khalil succeeds in making his film, only to have it forbidden from screening by the local authorities. This is the moment when real life intervenes, and we discover that what we have been watching all along is none other than Khalil's feature film.