For Lebanese visual artist and filmmaker Ali Cherri, the violence of war, chaos, and displacement find its way into the soil under our feet. In his feature film The Dam, set in northern Sudan, Cherri follows Maher (Maher El Khair), a quiet brick worker who spends his days toiling under the blazing sun. Day after day, Maher builds bricks with mud and water, born out of the Nile River. The work is backbreaking, and Maher and the other men who work with him are cheated out of fair wages. Yet, despite the presence of a painful wound on his back, shaky cellphone service that leaves him adrift from his loved ones, and news of the bloody civil uprisings in the central city, Maher toils on.
At night while the other men rest, Maher's laboring continues. He slips away on a borrowed motorbike into a desert clearing. There, he constructs a mysterious structure made from mud. Though the structure is never explicitly named, the audience immediately recognizes Maher's reverence for it and the diligent way he works on it. The structure is the key to his freedom. It is a symbol of a different kind of life he might have.
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