Berlin International Film Festival 2006

The expedition falls to peices as their leader decides to build a house at the foot of one of the dunes and on his death, two women are left alone to build some kind of a life in the wasteland.

The mother and daughter's lives are then pursued through several generations as the film spans almost 60 years of the twentieth century with two outstanding actresses, Fernanda Torres and Fernanda Montenegro sharing and swapping roles as the characters age and are renewed in a younger generation. This works brilliantly as the actor's age differences are sustained, however the transitions are sometimes fudged, so it is not always clear when we are seeing the end of a dramatic episode, or one of the generational shifts.

The women are trapped in a landscape, a thinly populated region that offers almost nothing and the shifting sands continually threated their survival. Interesting, the family seem to have enjoyed a comfortable life before being led on this foolhardy venture and as the decades pass, they are reduced to a hand to mouth existence and creeping illiteracy, as each generation has less to pass on.

Waddington works with 'Conspiracy Films', a group of directors and producers, who carry the legacy of Brazil's Cinema Novo, that sprang to attention with Glauber Rocha's 'Terra im Transe' in 1963. Montenegro is more than an actress, having served as Brazil's Minister of Culture. 'The House of Sand' should perhaps be seen as a metaphor for Brazilian experience, rather than an extended saga of destitution and the human spirit, but it is both of these. The women come into contact first with groups of former slaves, then a fishing community, a travelling tinker, a scientific expedition seeking proof of Einstein's Theories via astronomical observation. On each occasion they see the possiblity of escape. When the airforce begin to use the region as a training area, eventually the younger woman is given the chance to return to life in the city. While the personalities are strongly established by fine acting, they remain essentially anonymous characters, their culture a receding memory.

This is a significant film, working at a level of abstraction and conceptualisation that would be impossible in a North American production and its reception at Sundance (where it was showcased immediately before the Berlin Festival) raises an interesting issue. Given prominence by the Sundance organisers, the critical reaction from some festival goers was that Sundance is about 'American' cinema and they resented its inclusion. It will be interesting to see whether European audiences can give this movie the attention it deserves, or has cinema shifted so far from the aspirations of 'film culture' that this kind of major work no longer has a place in the transient cinema of flippantly manipulated genres?