‘Sand City’ review: Two disparate lives are linked by sand in lyrical Bangladeshi feature

Dir/scr: Mahde Hasan. Bangladesh. 2025. 99mins

Two lives are lived in parallel in Dhaka, Bangladesh; the link between them is sand. Emma (Victoria Chakma), a young woman from an ethnic minority community, covertly takes sand each week to fill her cat litter tray. Glass factory worker Hasan (Mostafa Monwar) steals silica sand from his employer, planning to make his own glass and eventually start a business. The strangers-in-a-big-city premise is hardly a unique starting point for a film, but convention suggests these two lives should intersect in some way. First-time feature director Mahde Hasan rejects that idea, keeping space between his two central characters throughout. It makes for an unexpected and slightly confounding film but also, thanks to Mathieu Giombini’s vibrant photography, a strikingly beautiful one. 

 A lyrical and atmospheric picture 

Dhaka-based filmmaker Hasan makes his feature debut having cut his teeth with a series of offbeat short films. I Am Time (2016) and Death Of A Reader (2018) both played in Locarno’s Open Doors screenings section; A Boring Film (2020) played in Locarno’s Leopards of Tomorrow international competition. Sand City continues his connection to the festival, having picked up development funding from its Open Doors jury. The film should appeal to festival programmers looking to showcase unconventional and experiment new voices, following its premiere in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima Competition.

As might be expected from a film that opens with quotes from William Blake (’To see a world in a grain of sand…’) and TS Eliot, this is a picture that leans into its poetic imagery. The sand, foundational in the stories of both characters, also represents the precarious nature of life in one of the world’s most densely populated cities. It is a nod to the permanent construction work that eats Dhaka from within. And the sand is a shifting, uncertain entity hiding a multitude of secrets.

One such mystery is a severed finger Emma discovers in the sand that she has collected for her litter tray. It is presumably a woman’s finger, the nail painted in a bold crimson. Rather than be repulsed, Emma finds the finger fascinating and, in a curious way, develops an emotional connection to the grisly, decaying memento. It is a human connection, perhaps, in a world that is hostile to Emma: her moped is regularly vandalised with racist graffiti, her life is solitary.

On the face of it, Hasan is a more gregarious character. Let go from the glass factory because of his light-fingered tendencies, he drifts around the city, from rickety fairgrounds to pavement dice games, with regular and well-lubricated visits to the bar. The disjointed, disconnected nature of the film is no accident. Life caught in the fast-moving currents of city life is not conducive to forging links with strangers. Sometimes it is all a person can do to keep afloat. But it is a storytelling choice that may prove challenging for audiences that expect closure.

Fortunately, the heady and enveloping tones of Giombini’s colour palette (it is shot on digital but graded to capture the saturated hues of Super 16) and the kaleidoscopic, fractured frames mean the film is visually engrossing, even when the story frays around the edges. The impressive work from Giombini, whose credits include Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Cannes 2021 Competition title Lingui: The Sacred Bonds, is complemented by a rich and textured soundscape from sound designer Oronnok Prithibi. Sand City is an oddity, certainly, but a lyrical and atmospheric picture nonetheless.