SAND STORM
12:30 2:30 4:40 7:00 9:15
Through Tuesday, October 11
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ELITE ZEXER
A debut feature that heralds a strong new iconoclastic voice in Israeli cinema. Elite Zexer’s drama of a mother and daughter, both in rebellion against the traditional strictures of Bedouin life, melds an ethnographer’s commitment to authenticity and a dramatist’s sensitivity to emotional nuance. Jalila is charged with making a wedding celebration for her husband’s second, much younger (much-resented) new bride – in the midst of which her daughter Layla’s surreptitious romance with a university student comes to light. Both women are caught in a tangled web of familial obligations and sexual humiliation -- a reactionary framework that continues to defy even rudimentary notions of Western individuality and freedom. Set in the vast, often gorgeous Negev Desert in southern Israel, SAND STORM may be the first movie in which cell phones share the screen with polygamous nomads.
ISRAEL • 2016 • 87 MINS. • IN ARABIC WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES • KINO LORBER
Reviews
“Dramatically absorbing.”
– Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter
“A sympathetic but clear-eyed look at the tangled skein of inequalities that entrap women (and the men they love and resent) in a Bedouin village stranded between modernization and anachronistic patriarchy. The film boasts alluring desert visuals, muscular acting and intricate psychology… the energy surely belongs to Blal-Asfour as (Layla’s) mother, a caged tiger who smolders and paces and delivers tongue-lashings.”
– Ella Taylor, Variety