Marvels of human engineering and paradoxical indicators of ongoing catastrophes both past and future, dams have a long history in cinema. From a River Nile view shot by the Lumières in 1897 to the evocative Still Life (2006), by Jia Zhang-ke, passing through Hulha branca (1932) by Manoel de Oliveira, there are many examples. The first feature film by Lebanese artist and filmmaker Ali Cherri also begins with one of these monumental constructions: the controversial Merowe dam, in Sudan. Prized by dictator Omar al-Bashir and entirely funded and built by Chinese enterprises, the project has had a significant environmental and human impact. However, Cherri’s carefully composed images prefer to relegate this colossal structure to the sidelines. The hydroelectric dam looms hauntingly over the film, charging it with energy and tensions from out of shot, where it is almost always kept. Like a fairytale, The Dam focuses on an enigmatic figure. Somewhere near a great river, in the shade of a gigantic dam, toils a man whose life is made of mud. This man is Maher: a mythical and almost entirely mute character, played by the non-professional actor and real-life worker Maher El Khair. Sublimated by Cherri’s framing, his brilliantly restrained face fills some of the film’s most powerful shots.

Maher and his impoverished colleagues produce mud bricks on the banks of the artificial lake created by the dam, reproducing age-old gestures and confronting the equally age-old arrogance of their abusive foreman. Announced on the radio and broadcast on television and their smartphones, the revolution taking place in Khartoum forms the violent, yet remote, backdrop to their days. Graffiti on the walls makes appeals to civil disobedience and an end to the military regime, but Maher seems detached from that current reality, so distant yet also so close. Whenever he can, he borrows a friend’s motorbike and crosses the semi-arid, rocky terrain that once belonged to the Black pharaohs of Nubia, in order to fulfil a different task: he is building a strange totem out of mud. Just as in other mythological tales, such as the epic poem Gilgamesh (always present in Ali Cherri’s work), his creation ends up coming to life. The creature interrogates Maher in dreams, develops gills, breathes heavily. An extraordinary nighttime sequence, between dream and hallucination, transports us to a noisy, vibrant forest worthy of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. However, the director is closer to Tsai Ming-Liang in the way he pays attention to places and things, including the time and matter of cinema.

The third chapter in a trilogy containing two short films — The Disquiet (2013) and The Digger (2015) — and themed around three elements — earth, water and fire — The Dam deftly combines different temporalities and registers. While inscribed in the present — evoked by the dam and its surrounding social fabric, as well as by the distant revolution — the story told by Cherri seems to arrive from “out of time”. Shifting between the eternal past and the present, the fairytale emerges from a simultaneously delicate and rigorous observation of its settings. Besides being a skilled storyteller, Cherri is something of a topographer or archaeologist. Driven by a desire to discover the layers of history hidden beneath the surface of the present (the brick workshop), the director uses his camera to map and minutely investigate the territories that intrigue and fascinate him. As a tale about the past and the present, The Dam takes on something of the beauty of an archaeological report.

Although Cherri’s film journeys subtly into the realms of magical realism, The Dam always remains attentive to the realness of things, the theatre of matter and bodies. While fire is at times present, the film is deeply rooted in earth and water, elements that, combined, form the muddy clay from which the bricks are made, and also the creature. This mixture from which life emerges, inspiring countless mythological stories, mud is here mobilised as Maher’s material gesture of creation and resistance: a material for making possibilities. Moreover, something unites the creature’s clay form and Maher’s human body. Aside from the mysterious wound that spreads across his back like a dry, fissured mudflat, both bodies succumb to aquatic forces, destructive and yet regenerative. Among them, tears: the one that, in a pivotal shot, falls furtively down the hieratic face of Maher, but also those on a cosmic scale — the turbulent waters of the river and sky — that ultimately carry the creature away. Bathed literally in tears, it vanishes as Maher looks on in wonder.