After work he walks into town, where he borrows a friend’s motorcycle, drives to a desert ravine and works on a mud structure of his own. Whenever the camp’s long-suffering dog wanders up to him in search of a bite to eat or a scratch behind the ears, the protagonist tells him to get lost. Set along a stretch of the Nile wending through Sudan, in an open-air brick-making factory and the adjacent desert, The Dam follows the story of Maher (Khair) who, with a dozen or so other migrant laborers, devotes his days to the repetitive toil of making mud bricks.Ī taciturn fellow, Maher doesn’t socialize much with the other laborers. It will come “home” later this month, with an expansive week-long run at two Beirut-area cinemas. The film’s theatrical run started in France in early March. The Dam premiered in 2022 during Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight (Quinzaine) and cut a swathe through several other (mostly non-North American) events - winning Cherri Best Artistic Achievement prize at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, while the Cairo International Film Festival awarded his lead actor, Maher El Khair, its Best Actor award. “Of Men and Gods and Mud,” Cherri’s mixed-media installation won him the Silver Lion for promising artist at the 2022 Venice Bienniale. Recently, his Instagram feed has blossomed with mud sculptures. He has worked extensively in multiple disciplines over the years - video and photography as well as performance and sculptural objects. The Dam is Cherri’s first feature film but he is well-known in contemporary art circles. San Francisco sent us an email, like, ‘Although we really liked the film, our audience is too sensitive for animal killing, so we cannot show it.’ Others said the same.”Ĭherri notes that none of these festivals expressed such concerns about the film’s human characters. “You’re laughing,” he tells L’Orient Today from his studio in Paris, but … it’s not just one festival. “I put it as a joke,” the writer-director explains, but the reassurance wasn’t enough to convince several North American festivals to program Cherri’s film. BEIRUT - The closing credits of Ali Cherri’s debut feature The Dam inform the public that no animals were harmed during the film’s production.
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