In keeping with its title, sand is all-pervasive in Bangladeshi filmmaker Mahde Hasan’s debut feature film, Sand City. It cements the parallel lives of two strangers in Dhaka in unexpected ways, while they remain oblivious of each other. Emma (Victoria Chakma), from the indigenous group, waiting for her visa to relocate abroad, steals sand from a construction site for her cat’s litter. Hasan filches silica sand, limestone, and soda ash from his workplace to start his own glass manufacturing business. Both want a better life but sand, the defining feature of their megacity, becomes a metaphor for their own unstable, tenuous lives and the temporality of human existence in general.
Mahde Hasan
Mahde Hasan is an introspective Bangladeshi filmmaker whose shorts I Am Time, Death of a Reader, and A Boring Film screened at the Locarno Festival. He won Locarno’s ‘movieofmylife’ competition with Where Is the Friend’s Home. His debut feature, Sand City, received support from the CNC, La Fabrique Cinéma (Cannes), Visions Sud Est (Switzerland), Locarno Open Doors Hub, and Nantes Produire au Sud. His background also includes participation in two film residency programs in Switzerland (2018) and Los Angeles(Film Independent, 2023).
