Lebanese artist and film-maker Ali Cherri, artist-in-residence at London’s National Gallery in 2021, makes his feature film debut with a visually striking, ruminative and mysterious piece of work, a kind of magic social realist vision. 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 in the Directors’ Fortnight section.
It is a drama teetering on the verge of a heatstroke hallucination, with flourishes 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 army after months of protests. Maher (Maher El Khair) is working by the riverbank making bricks in the burning sun, for a foreman who is always liable to dock people’s pay. Listlessly succumbing to a kind of metaphysical torpor, Maher listens to news reports about the revolution’s gathering momentum and every evening he goes off to build a strange pagan statue, something like a Wicker Man for the Arab spring, which appears to be having a life of its own. Meanwhile, Maher is developing his own alarming physical symptoms: a wound that may be the entry point for a supernatural intelligence introducing Maher to new ideas.
Cherri has a marvellous visual and compositional sense, often creating startling images in the desert plains, which look like Tatooine. And the dam itself? An image of the government’s doomed attempt to stem the tide of revolution? Perhaps. It’s interesting work, though perhaps it fetishises Maher’s enigmatic silence a little too much.
Lebanese artist and film-maker Ali Cherri, artist-in-residence at London’s National Gallery in 2021, makes his feature film debut with a visually striking, ruminative and mysterious piece of work, a kind of magic social realist vision. 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 in the Directors’ Fortnight section.
It is a drama teetering on the verge of a heatstroke hallucination, with flourishes 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 army after months of protests. Maher (Maher El Khair) is working by the riverbank making bricks in the burning sun, for a foreman who is always liable to dock people’s pay. Listlessly succumbing to a kind of metaphysical torpor, Maher listens to news reports about the revolution’s gathering momentum and every evening he goes off to build a strange pagan statue, something like a Wicker Man for the Arab spring, which appears to be having a life of its own. Meanwhile, Maher is developing his own alarming physical symptoms: a wound that may be the entry point for a supernatural intelligence introducing Maher to new ideas.
Cherri has a marvellous visual and compositional sense, often creating startling images in the desert plains, which look like Tatooine. And the dam itself? An image of the government’s doomed attempt to stem the tide of revolution? Perhaps. It’s interesting work, though perhaps it fetishises Maher’s enigmatic silence a little too much.