Sand Storm - how do you choose between freedom and damaging family duty?

Sand Storm is an excellent and interesting depiction of family life in a community I knew next to nothing about – a Bedouin village in Israel, starting to become more integrated with the modern world and facing challenges adapting to this.

The film focuses on student Layla, who has a somewhat stormy relationship with her traditionalist mother and a deteriorating one with the father who allows her to go to college and is teaching her to drive, but whose limited progressivism doesn’t run too deep as he has also just married a second wife.  Layla’s determination to be in control of her own life, and her misjudgement of each parent’s views will go on to cause a storm within the family and a huge dilemma for Layla with her beloved younger sisters possible collateral damage.

The characters of Layla and her mother Jalila are really well developed. It is not at all clear how they will react to any situation but the choice they make is always believable and feels true to the character.  Both these lead actors pitch their performances superbly and one of the fantastic choices that director Elite Zexer makes is allowing the actors to have several wordless exchanges, understanding that sometimes things are more powerful if not said out loud.

In the Q&A following the film, Zexer describes how she gathered the story from her long friendships with Bedouin families, over ten or so years. Although an outsider, she is clearly passionate about the status of Bedouin families and villages, and this connection helps the audience be immersed in this family’s life. She brings out the characters without judgement and in a way that doesn’t feel like she is treating them like some exotic other, but someone’s whose internal world she is familiar with. She is particularly good at drawing out the impact on a closer relationship with the modern world and the turmoil that brings to tradition and social structures, particularly when it comes to the place of women.

In researching what films to see at this year’s festival, I came across a review praising this film but noting that the reviewer felt they’d already seen this story because there had been a few films about women in conservative Middle Eastern societies recently. I suspect that the number of women in conservative Middle Eastern societies isn’t that different to the number of white men in the US, and I’m pretty sure we’ve had more than a few films about them in the last few years, many with roughly the same story and roughly the same setting. But anyway, enough of the snark! One of the great things about Sand Storm and Elite Zexer’s storytelling is that this feels like a story I haven’t seen before, with characters who were new to me. There are millions of different stories about women in that and every other region waiting to be told. Sand Storm was a wonderful character drama, that was gripping and beautiful, funny and sad, and that’s what matters about it. It was a fascinating insight into a world I didn’t know about and, in Layla, a character as vital and interesting as any you’ll find in most films.