THE DAM

In northern Sudan, on the bank of the Nile near the Merowe Dam, Maher (Maher El Khair) works in a brickyard: cutting clay, moulding it, firing it, day after day in the shadow of the vast structure built by a Chinese company. Every evening he disappears into the desert. There he secretly builds a figure out of mud, metres high, with arms like branches and hollow eyes. News of the protests against Omar al-Bashir comes through on the radio – and as the country rises up, Maher’s creature seems to awaken. “The Dam” by Ali Cherri (Sudan, 2022) is a political fable that begins with documentary calm and tips into something supernatural.

Lebanese artist Ali Cherri, awarded the Silver Lion for a promising artist at the Venice Biennale, closes a trilogy on the “geography of violence” – how crises inscribe themselves into landscapes – with his first feature film. The first half observes manual labour, the scrape of shovels, the crackle of fire; the second opens onto dream images in which the dam itself becomes the threat. It premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes in 2022. “The Dam” was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2022 in the Berlinale World Cinema Fund section.

Shown at the 2022 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2022 · Film Archive