Sand City (2025), Mehde Hasan’s debut feature, derives its title from the city of Dhaka: Bangladesh’s capital and a huge industrial metropolis. Directly from the opening, it becomes clear how fundamental the grainy material is to the city and its inhabitants. Sand trucks roam the streets, distributing sand from its harbour to construction sites. The film directly mesmerises with its rich visuals.

In its first moments, it’s reluctant to let humans enter the frame, as silhouettes are captured digging up sand, shrouding the workers of Dhaka in a veil of anonymity. Even more impressive is the film’s rich and invasive sound design. Dhaka is the loudest city in the world, and the film rarely frees us from the constant noise of traffic and construction works, even when the action resorts to indoor spaces. 

Gradually, Sand City introduces its two protagonists, naming them ‘’two lost souls in a metropolis’’ who live their lives parallel to each other. The connection between them, of course, lies in sand. Glass factory worker Hasan (Mostafa Monwar) steals bags of sand from his employer, and Emma (Victoria Chakma) also lifts the material to fill her cat’s litter box. Sand is not only a necessary aspect of their day-to-day lives, but also a multi-faceted metaphor that explains the sense of alienation the characters are feeling. The sand on which Dhaka is built is, for instance, a foundation that lacks stability, something that Hasan and Emma also suffer from. Simultaneously, sand symbolises the way they deal with the passage of time, as one of the intertitles is literally ‘’there is no escaping the sand’’. 

These literary techniques hold down the two lonely souls more than they give them depth, at worst turning them into vessels through which director Hasan expresses his ideas about the human condition. It’s noticeable that Hasan is trying to constrain them deliberately, in the spirit of modernists such as Michelangelo Antonioni, but his attempts at this do not always succeed. This is mostly due to shallow screenwriting, a low point being an erotic sequence where Emma caresses herself with a severed finger she keeps around the house. The strengths of Sand City lie mostly in the fascinating images of the city. During the strong ending of the film, the shadows from the beginning of the film also return, moving the characters to the background once again. 

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Written by Gijs Suy

Featured image courtesy of Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

The film was screened at the Five Flavours Film Festival in Poland.

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