The Dam review – eerie, hallucinatory tale of Sudan on the brink – The Guardian
Lebanese artist and film-maker Ali Cherri, artist-in-residence at London’s Nationwide Gallery in 2021, makes his function movie debut with a visually putting, ruminative and mysterious piece of labor, a type of magic social realist imaginative and prescient. The script was developed with two French cinema heavyweights, producer and screenwriter Geoffroy Grison and director Bertrand Bonello and it premiered at Cannes in 2022 within the Administrators’ Fortnight part.
It’s a drama teetering on the verge of a heatstroke hallucination, with prospers of violence. The setting is the hydroelectric Merowe dam in northern Sudan on the Nile; it’s 2019, and President Omar al-Bashir is about to be deposed by the military after months of protests. Maher (Maher El Khair) is working by the riverbank making bricks within the burning solar, for a foreman who’s all the time liable to dock individuals’s pay. Listlessly succumbing to a type of metaphysical torpor, Maher listens to information stories in regards to the revolution’s gathering momentum and each night he goes off to construct an odd pagan statue, one thing like a Wicker Man for the Arab spring, which seems to be having a lifetime of its personal. In the meantime, Maher is creating his personal alarming bodily signs: a wound that could be the entry level for a supernatural intelligence introducing Maher to new concepts.
Cherri has a marvellous visible and compositional sense, typically creating startling photographs within the desert plains, which seem like Tatooine. And the dam itself? A picture of the federal government’s doomed try to stem the tide of revolution? Maybe. It’s fascinating work, although maybe it fetishises Maher’s enigmatic silence just a little an excessive amount of.
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