Cinema Without Borders: Life in a metro—Sand City
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.
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