Maher El Khair, Mudathir Musa, Santino Aguer Ding
Lebanese artist and filmmaker Ali Cherri’s visually thrilling, quietly political first feature is set among Sudanese bricklayers working on the biggest hydroelectric dam in Africa.
Sudan, near the Merowe Dam: Maher (played by Maher El Khair, like the other performers in the film, a non-professional actor and himself a bricklayer) works in a traditional brickyard fed by the waters of the Nile. Every evening, he wanders into the desert to work on a mysterious construction made of mud. While the Sudanese people rise to claim their freedom, his creation starts to take a life of its own…
An oblique, allegorical and enigmatic film with a touch of magical realism, The Dam was shot in Sudan during the 2018-19 revolution that saw President Omar al-Bashir deposed after 30 years in power, and forms a trilogy with Cherri’s short films The Disquiet and The Digger, all themed around “the geography of violence” and interrogating how political and social crises may become embedded in the natural world.
