Lebanese director Ali Cherri’s debut feature film, The Dam (2022), was consistently one of the most overlooked films at NYFF and other festivals. And what a shame. Though the film has its shortcomings, it also has a lot to offer: an important topic, evocative landscape, and intriguing character and concept, that will especially appeal to fans of slow-paced cinema.
Maher (played by nonprofessional actor Maher El Khair) is one of many workers living on the reservoir created by the Merowe Dam in Northern Sudan. Like his real-life counterpart, he works as a bricklayer, slapping wet mud into wooden molds that are left to dry underneath the scorching sun. The labor is arduous, unforgiving, and underpaid: The men live in ramshackle houses, are (likely) being ripped off by their bosses, and Maher himself suffers from a gash on the side of his torso that bleeds throughout the film.
Despite these difficult circumstances, Maher has found one thing that connects him to the land being destroyed around him. A giant mound of mud he is constructing, around 2-3 people tall, surrounded by a scaffold that Maher built. Is it a statue? A creature? Either way, the mud-being seems to come alive to Maher, talking to him, burrowing into his dreams. To Cherri’s credit, this magical realism is subtle. The focus is always locked on Maher, with mud-being becoming a potent symbol of his connection to the land amidst the destruction around him.
First things first: This is an especially slow paced film. Each shot routinely lasts for over 20-30 seconds (some even for a few minutes), lingering over small moments from Maher’s daily life: trips to the city, a doctor’s visit, his motorcycle trips to where his creature of mud is being built. Since there’s not much dialogue in the film, these visuals are crucial to expressing the film’s thematic landscape. It’s especially successful at viscerally capturing the ecology of the landscape: shots linger on the mud that Maher shapes, slaps, and solidifies, the water that mixes with the remnants of Maher’s blood and life, highlighting his shifting connections with the land.
Viewers who enjoy this type of slow, thematic pacing will find The Dam especially poetic and meaningful. Others, however, may finish the film wondering where its 80 minute runtime went. The consequence of the static shooting style is that the rest of the film gets little substantial development, leaving the rest of its themes—and its political commentary— undercooked.
After all, in a short runtime, Cherri takes aim at numerous massive topics: ecological destruction, political upheaval, displacement. It cannot be overstressed how absolutely imperative this context is. The construction of the Merowe Dam had catastrophic consequences on the local region, which the UN identified as human rights abuses: forcible displacement of local citizens, poverty, violence, and exploitation. Displaced citizens were not properly compensated, and protests against the dam, and for remuneration, were violently suppressed. On top of that, the film’s events occur during the 2019 coup d’etat against former President Omar al-Bashir, spurred by widespread discontent over the rising costs of food and basic necessities.
To be clear, this political landscape is present in the film. In fact, it’s some of The Dam’s most compelling scenes. A worker argues with a merciless manager (or boss), who underpays him despite pulling up to the worksite in a nice car. A long shot captures the physicality and difficulty of the brickmaking the men do. And the constant coverage of the uprising against al-Bashir plays on the radio throughout the film, a sort of found footage-soundtrack.
However, though these moments are compelling, the rest of the narrative does little to build on them. There are many traces and signs of the important political topics mentioned earlier; there, however, is little in terms of substantial analysis, commentary, or exploration. For instance, Maher’s attitudes towards the political and economic forces impacting his life Is understated bordering on insubstantial; the ending of his narrative arc feels especially disconnected from the rest of the narrative. This leaves the strange impression that the film is constantly in its first act, a beginning without an ending. Sure, these connections can be teased out thematically and visually to an extent. But overall, the film’s lack of development raises the question of whether more could have been done with its premise.
Regardless, The Dam is an evocative and enigmatic piece of cinema. It is a carefully crafted film devoted to subtle storytelling, that pays close attention to the environment it takes place in. It focuses on critical issues—among those, labor exploitation, ecological destruction, displacement, poverty— that are only becoming more and more relevant in our current world. And though it’ll appeal more to those who prefer a more slow-paced, abstracted film style, it is compelling enough for all to ponder on.
The Dam was viewed in the Currents section of New York Film Festival 2022.
Director: Ali Cherri
Writer: Ali Cherri, Geoffroy Grison & Bertrand Bonello
Rated: NR
Runtime: 80m
The Dam is an evocative and enigmatic piece of cinema.
-
GVN Rating 7
-
User Ratings (0 Votes)
0