The title of Bangladeshi filmmaker Mahde Hasan’s debut feature film, Sand City, gives a peek into what it’s all about. Just like sand slips through the fingers, it’s difficult to hold on to one’s desired course in life in the crowded, congested, chaotic, unplanned, polluted megacity of Dhaka. A city where, as a character in the film states, there’s no dearth of sand; you can’t live with sand, you can’t live without sand, there’s no escaping sand. Accordingly, life also flows here like the moving sands, erratic and haphazard. Instability is all.

The film dwells on all that’s intractable and ephemeral through the parallel stories of two individuals—strangers to each other but bonded unawares by sand that appears to serve a significant purpose for them. But does it truly offer a release and relief, or stifle them? Does it lend a helping hand or suffocate them? Emma (Victoria Chakma) filches sand from a construction site at night for her cats’ litter. She is in transit in Dhaka, working and waiting for her visa to relocate abroad, in search of a better life. From the indigenous group, she is also at the centre of the majoritarian prejudice and cruel slurs. Hasan (Mostafa Monwar) has ambitions of improving his lot in the city itself. He steals silica sand, limestone and soda ash from his workplace and hoards it with the aim of starting a glass manufacturing business. Their paths cross fleetingly, unknowingly, in the traffic, through a lost mobile and an orphaned pet. Things take a turn when he is suspended on the grounds of his misdemeanour, and she discovers a severed finger with crimson nail paint in her heap of sand. She finds a strange kinship with it, speaking volumes about the endemic violence against women that creates its own sense of sisterhood.

The Bangladeshi film won the top award in the recently held Karlovy Vary International Film Festival’s Proxima section that focuses on bold, radical and inventive works. True to that, the intrepidly crafted, off-the-beaten-path film is an exciting, artistically audacious addition to the new wave Bangladeshi cinema. The most obvious bit of its ingenuity lies in the visual flair with which it frames Dhaka. The city is a character itself, larger than life and looming large over its inhabitants, Emma and Hasan. The film unspools like a compelling collage or kaleidoscope of several snapshots of a tumultuous, anarchic Dhaka, its cheek by jowl way of life, all that drives and propels it and the tenuousness that underlines it. A city that is visibly crumbling but in a constant state of construction, albeit on a precarious foundation of sand. It’s about the moral, spiritual degeneration seeping deep into the city, accompanying the thrust of economic pursuits. A concurrent flux of dissolution and continuation marks the lives of Emma and Hasan as well. The city and the humans that live in it are woven together in a compelling tapestry and are marked by a similar spirit of survival against all odds. Sand City opens with a steady flow of fractured images and situational sounds, accompanying human silence. In fact, the entire narrative is defined by such visual and aural fragmentation and wordlessness.

Director Mahde Hasan, along with his cinematographer Mathieu Giombini, sound designer Oronnok Prithibi and art director Rainirr Borshon, play with the city’s sights and sounds; the architecture, monuments, buildings, flyovers, statues, cement and concrete, and traffic get captured in a hyper-real manner. The spatial element—the structural grids, industrial geometry, factory settings and mall designs—and the chiaroscuro add to the hazy, doom-filled, gothic mood. However, the most mundane, often dehumanising routines also flow with a beat and rhythm of their own. Victoria delineates Emma with silence, stoicism and inscrutability. On the other hand, Monwar, one of the most spectacular contemporary South Asian acting talents, gives an unrestrained, expansive touch to his role of the eccentric misfit Hasan. Both their faces tell their own stories. Both are trapped in their own ways in Dhaka. Both are in search of better days, within it or outside. And both are as vulnerable as they are resilient, as fragile as they are unbreakable.