The Dam: a mystical Sudanese tale

For a film that mostly takes place outdoors, among the vast, breathtaking deserts of northern Sudan, Ali Cherri’s feature manages to cloak its sprawling vista in an atmosphere of mystery. Primarily known as an artist, Cherri has previously directed two acclaimed shorts, The Disquiet (2013) and The Digger (2015), which explored the geography of violence. 

A concluding chapter to the trilogy, The Dam sets its sights on the Merowe Dam, a colossal structure erected by a Chinese company that hires precarious local workers on the cheap. A destructive force to the ecological system, the project also cruelly displaces the local Manasir community, an indigenous tribe which has dwelled beside the river Nile for centuries. In casting Maher El Khair, one of the bricklayers on the site, as the protagonist, the film builds a beguiling tension between documentary and fiction, the real and the symbolic. 

Guided by the rhythm of the workers’ daily tasks, which involve producing hundreds of identical bricks from wet mud, The Dam poetically emphasises the tactility of manual labour. Patiently observing the men who toil under the burning sun, the camera lingers on their dirt-stained hands and legs, a physical imprint of the exploitation thrust upon their bodies. Their exertions are also rendered in sonic terms. In place of dialogue, the sounds of shovels digging into the earth or fire crackling inside the numerous kilns coalesce into a hypnotic symphony. Also woven into their arduous routines are the spectral voices of TV and radio broadcasters covering the 2019 military coup that put an end to Omar al-Bashir’s decades-long rule of the country. Compellingly threaded together, such aural details illustrate how these disenfranchised figures are overwhelmed by uncertainties both personal and political.

In contrast to the observational style of these vignettes, the latter half of the film swerves into the realm of magical realism. Once relieved from his duties at the brickyard, Maher hops on a borrowed motorcycle and rides into the depths of the desert, where he is secretly building a towering mud idol of his own. The creation of this otherworldly edifice, which has tree branches as arms, feels like a reclamation of agency. As Maher tends to his growing totem, his labour ceases to be transactional, transformed into an act of love and worship. 

More than a natural resource to be ruthlessly extracted, under Maher’s dexterous hands mud becomes a source of renewal as well as an expression of discontent. In a dream sequence reminiscent of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films – which imagine a holistic communion between human and nature – the golem-esque structure suddenly becomes sentient and ominously enquires after the restlessness of Maher’s soul. “Why are you wandering so?,” the idol asks, a question to which the young man has no answers.

From this point on, the narrative of The Dam, and Maher’s actions, are increasingly mysterious. An open wound on his back, previously a dull discomfort, begins to fester and spread, its scaly appearance resembling the dry, cracked soil that runs alongside the river Nile. As the violence inflicted on the land turns eerily corporeal, other unsettling incidents follow. After witnessing the dead body of a co-worker floating upstream, Maher is driven to his own act of brutality: he bludgeons a stray dog to death.

Utterly random in its ugliness, the scene is intended as some kind of exorcism of inner demons, but it comes off as intellectually hollow. Though critical of the way the workers are treated as if interchangeable, The Dam unwittingly commits the same sin with this shocking moment, denying Maher a perceptible emotional interior. The character’s destructive behaviour is treated as yet another mystical manifestation of the violence embedded in the landscape. Straying away from its initial material analysis of labour and exploitation, the film ends up overindulging in allegories and myths, which inadvertently flatten the very real geopolitical conflicts of Sudan into impenetrable abstractions. 

As Maher’s wound magically fades and his mud idol crumbles into the ground, the ending vaguely gestures toward a transcendental catharsis. However, without the thematic and conceptual specificity of the director’s previous efforts, the film languishes in a state of inertia. With the 2019 mass protests in the background, a historical moment steeped in revolutionary potential, it is strange and misguided for The Dam to detach itself from this collective fervour for change.

► The Dam is in select UK cinemas from 12 May.