The Dam is the final part of Lebanese visual artist Ali Cherri’s film trilogy about what he describes as “geographies of violence”. The first short film, The Disquiet, uses fault lines and earthquakes as a metaphor for Lebanon’s long-running political crises; the second short, The Digger, chronicles a lone caretaker of some ancient ruins in the arid hinterlands of the United Arab Emirates, his conservation work becoming a building block of the country’s historical narrative.
This final installment, which also happens to be Cherri’s first feature-length work, elaborates on the themes of the previous two, while also extending its engagement with an audience perhaps more conventional than his usual museum-gallery fanbase. Set among a group of bricklayers toiling in the remote north of Sudan, The Dam is about both destruction and construction – or to be exact, catastrophe dressed up as creation, symbolised by the titular, monstrous mega-structure which looms large over the protagonists’ lives.
Zeroing in on a worker’s slow descent into madness as he nurtures a mud-made Frankenstein in the wilderness – an act of defiance, perhaps, against that monument to human folly which ruined the Nile and submerged villages – Cherri’s film is at once mesmerizingly poetic as much as it is quietly political. A kindred spirit of Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose work also straddles screens in both dark theatres and white-cube environments, Cherri is certain to be come an even more established name on the festival circuit after his appearance in the Directors’ Fortnight programme at Cannes this year.
At the center of The Dam is Maher (Maher El Khair), a man who earns a living making bricks in a small workshop on an arid plain in northern Sudan. While he and his fellow workers do enjoy the odd trappings of modern life – if a radio qualifies as being “modern” – their existence seems somehow frozen in time. Creating mud bricks from kilns fired up by tree branches, the men’s very traditional production method contrasts sharply with the Chinese-funded Merowe Dam, the biggest of its kind in Africa and a project which allowed Sudanese dictator Omar el Bashir to boast that he ushered his country into modernity.
Maher and his co-workers spend off-duty hours sitting by or even swimming in the artificial lake created by the dam. But we soon see something amiss in the water: tracking shots reveal strands of crimson bubbling and swirling on the surface. Would that be the blood oozing from mysterious wound on Maher’s back? Or maybe something bubbling to the surface from below, traces of the violent resettlement of villagers which preceded the construction of the dam? Perhaps a sign of the bloodbath unfolding in the capital of Khartoum, where an uprising against Bashir is taking place, as we (and the bricklayers) follow snippets of news on their radio?
Cherri refrains from offering overt answers to this, just as he doesn’t explain why Maher wanders off every night to build a towering structure with mud. But the pleasure of watching The Dam lies in joining all the dots the director provides. Maher might be trying to conjure up some kind of meaning from the slaving monotony he goes through day after day; a Sisyphus-like figure, he has to contend with his own doubts and the godly dream voices which question his futility and vanity.
Cherri highlights the way he and his fellow laborers exist on the geographical and social margins in life. Living far away from Khartoum, the revolutionary events are simply passing them by; even in the region where they move about, they differ markedly in their appearance and background with the imams, doctors and even security personnel around them, making them outcasts in an already small community.
All this takes a psychological toll on Maher, and his crumbling mental state is heightened by the a mix of sweeping visuals of the windswept landscapes and close-ups of strange objects and troubled faces, as well as am ominous sound design. A real-life bricklayer with no acting experience, El Khair brings his character’s conflicted psyche vividly to the screen. A truly internalized performance, he slowly and surely unleashes Maher’s pent-up fury, culminating in a fantastical finale.
Director: Ali Cherri
Screenwriters: Ali Cherri, Geoffroy Grison in collaboration with Bertrand Bonello
Cast: Maher El Khair
Producers: Janja Kralj
Director of photography: Bassem Fayad
Editor: Isabelle Manquillet, Nelly Quettier
Production designer: Abbas Al Khalifa
Music composer: ROB
Sound designers: Thomas Van Pottelberge, Jakov Munizaba, Simon Apostolou
Production company: KinoElektron
World sales: Indie Sales
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In Arabic
80 minutes
