‘Sand City’ review: Two disparate lives are linked by sand in lyrical Bangladeshi feature

Dir/scr: Mahde Hasan. Bangladesh. 2025. 99mins

Two lives are lived in parallel in Dhaka, Bangladesh; the hyperlink between them is sand. Emma (Victoria Chakma), a younger lady from an ethnic minority neighborhood, covertly takes sand every week to fill her cat litter tray. Glass manufacturing unit employee Hasan (Mostafa Monwar) steals silica sand from his employer, planning to make his personal glass and finally begin a enterprise. The strangers-in-a-big-city premise is hardly a singular place to begin for a movie, however conference suggests these two lives ought to intersect not directly. First-time function director Mahde Hasan rejects that concept, maintaining house between his two central characters all through. It makes for an surprising and barely confounding movie but additionally, because of Mathieu Giombini’s vibrant pictures, a strikingly stunning one. 

 A lyrical and atmospheric image 

Dhaka-based filmmaker Hasan makes his function debut having reduce his enamel with a collection of offbeat brief movies. I Am Time (2016) and Dying Of A Reader (2018) each performed in Locarno’s Open Doorways screenings part; A Boring Movie (2020) performed in Locarno’s Leopards of Tomorrow worldwide competitors. Sand Metropolis continues his connection to the pageant, having picked up growth funding from its Open Doorways jury. The movie ought to attraction to pageant programmers trying to showcase unconventional and experiment new voices, following its premiere in Karlovy Fluctuate’s Proxima Competitors.

As may be anticipated from a movie that opens with quotes from William Blake (’To see a world in a grain of sand…’) and TS Eliot, it is a image that leans into its poetic imagery. The sand, foundational within the tales of each characters, additionally represents the precarious nature of life in one of many world’s most densely populated cities. It’s a nod to the everlasting development work that eats Dhaka from inside. And the sand is a shifting, unsure entity hiding a large number of secrets and techniques.

One such thriller is a severed finger Emma discovers within the sand that she has collected for her litter tray. It’s presumably a girl’s finger, the nail painted in a daring crimson. Moderately than be repulsed, Emma finds the finger fascinating and, in a curious method, develops an emotional connection to the grisly, decaying memento. It’s a human connection, maybe, in a world that’s hostile to Emma: her moped is repeatedly vandalised with racist graffiti, her life is solitary.

On the face of it, Hasan is a extra gregarious character. Let go from the glass manufacturing unit due to his light-fingered tendencies, he drifts across the metropolis, from rickety fairgrounds to pavement cube video games, with common and well-lubricated visits to the bar. The disjointed, disconnected nature of the movie is not any accident. Life caught within the fast-moving currents of metropolis life shouldn’t be conducive to forging hyperlinks with strangers. Generally it’s all an individual can do to maintain afloat. However it’s a storytelling selection that will show difficult for audiences that anticipate closure.

Happily, the heady and enveloping tones of Giombini’s color palette (it’s shot on digital however graded to seize the saturated hues of Tremendous 16) and the kaleidoscopic, fractured frames imply the movie is visually engrossing, even when the story frays across the edges. The spectacular work from Giombini, whose credit embody Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Cannes 2021 Competitors title Lingui: The Sacred Bonds, is complemented by a wealthy and textured soundscape from sound designer Oronnok Prithibi. Sand Metropolis is an oddity, definitely, however a lyrical and atmospheric image nonetheless.