‘Our Share Of Sand’ review: A move from the UK to rural India proves a painful rite-of-passage in quietly powerful debut

Dir/scr: Shalini Adnani. UK/India/Greece. 2026. 95mins

A 12-year-old girl is uprooted from her home in the UK and travels with her mother to live with her estranged father in rural India – a move that proves a culture shock in more ways than one. The debut feature from Shalini Adnani, a Chilean-born, London-based filmmaker of Indian origin, effectively takes a child’s-eye view on several big topics: India’s class system, generational privilege and the environmental crisis. Our Share Of Sand is a slight film, but there’s power in its lightness of touch and authentic voice.

Shot with a level-headedness that foregrounds the issues without melodramatic fanfare

Those qualities should stand the film in good stead  following its premiere in Venice Critics Week and subsequent play in London’s first feature competition. It’s supported by Film4 and BFI, and produced by Mumbai-based Alan McAlex of Sister Pictures, who worked on recent Bafta-nominated productions Santosh and Sister Midnight. While Our Share Of Sand may not quite make the same impact as those features, it certainly marks out Adnani, a 2025 Screen Star Of Tomorrow, as a talent to watch.

After spending her entire life living in the UK, Maya (impressive newcomer Maya Mehta) has moved with her mother Priti (Ellora Torchia, also a former Screen Star Of Tomorrow) to the Indian home of her father, sandmining business owner Rohan (Mohammad Zeeshan Ayuub). Reasons for the move remain unclear but, while Maya feels like a fish out of water, she seems delighted by the chance to get to know her dad. She accompanies Rohan out on his sandmining missions, in which his workers – including young boys like Maya’s new friend Kiran (Krish Raj More) – dive into the river to bring up buckets of sand, which will eventually be turned into concrete to fuel the country’s big city regeneration boom. That this practice is eroding riverbanks and causing catastrophic flooding is addressed later in the film.

Adnani, a former Screen Star Of Tomorrow, takes a quiet, observational approach, cinematographer Adric Watson’s camera finding its feet along with Maya, sticking closely with her as she works out the lay of the land. (The film shot in the north of India, predominantly in the hill station of Mahabaleshwar, eight hours from Mumbai, and the town of Wai in Maharashtra.) The family house is cool and comfortable, the money from Rohan’s business affording plush furnishings and a phalanx of servants; an uncomfortable contrast to the meagre homes of Rohan’s workers.

Inspired by her own diaspora identity and childhood summers spent in India, Adnani’s screenplay operates in a kind of liminal space within this cloistered environment. Maya is not blind to the hierarchies that exist in this household,  and can’t understand why the servants are held at arms length or why her friendship with Kiran should be viewed with consternation. Yet she is very much part of this wealthy family, is viewed as an outsider by the locals. And when Maya witnesses an accident on a nighttime dredging trip, the police get involved and her father refuses to take responsibility, she finds her loyalties torn.

As a young person dependent on her family, Maya is obviously limited in the actions she can take; she conveys her displeasure through small acts of rebellion like breaking her father’s cigarettes. It’s a lovely, balanced performance from Mehta, who demonstrates quiet restraint even as Maya has the scales ripped unceremoniously from her eyes. Equally as compelling is Torchia as Priti, who acts as something of an emotional bellwether for both her daughter and the audience, her composure slowly unravelling in this claustrophobic atmosphere. As the family closes ranks around Rohan, Priti begins to drink too much, lapses into silence, refuses to get out of bed – all cues that convince Maya that something is very wrong.

But this is, of course, a complex situation. A somewhat on-the-nose but emotionally tense dinner party sequence reveals the tanged ideologies that surround the regeneration of countries like India. One of the guests at the table, an academic, posits the idea that redeveloping slums doesn’t work, as it changes people’s lifestyles into something unsustainable. “Some people want to keep the whole country enslaved,’ snaps Rohan. He sees his business as an important cog in the wheel of progress, seemingly blind to the real-world impact it is having on those who will always live far from the cities.

Such knotty moral contradictions are woven throughout Our Share Of Sand, and Adnani handles them with sensitivity and control. The film is shot with a level-headedness that foregrounds the issues without melodramatic fanfare, allowing the film to become an incisive study of complicity, legacy and breaking the cycle of history.