![]() ![]() Even though there’s a fairly obvious metaphor at work here – the land being subdivided into a commodity, one that promises to form the foundation of something else – The Dam’s patient observation refrains from overstating it. As news reports mark the unfolding of the 2019 Sudanese coup d’etat, Maher (Maher El Khair) and his colleagues work at a production plant along the Nile, slopping mud into metal molds to generate hundreds of identical adobe bricks. The Dam starts out quite well, with Cherri focusing on the labor process as a kind of counterpoint to broader political shifts. In creating a fiction/documentary hybrid set in Sudan, Cherri has produced a film that embodies a great many world cinema clichés without bringing a great deal to the table that’s new or provocative. With all this in mind, anticipation was high for The Dam, Cherri’s feature debut, which played in this year’s Quinzaine. His 2011 film Pipe Dreams was a miniature triptych about the hopes and failures of the Arab Spring, and his slightly longer film The Disquiet (2013) examined instability in Lebanese life, both on a cultural and a seismic level, literalizing the concept of a society breaking along various fault lines. Lebanese filmmaker Ali Cherri has been a bit of a fixture on the festival circuit with his wry, melancholy short works addressing the state of the Arab world. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |