The Grand Jury Prize in the foreign films section at Sundance, “Sand Storm” is the first film by director Elite Zexer. She will take us into the heart of a family living in a Bedouin village located in the Israeli Negev desert.
The young Israeli director had already set the intrigue of her first short film, “Tasnim,” in a Bedouin community. She shot her first feature film in a village on the Jordanian border and turned it into a tragedy with three characters, driven by forces beyond their control.
Festivities are in full swing in a small Bedouin village in Israel, on the border with Jordan: Suleiman, already married to Jalila, is marrying his second wife. While Jalila tries to swallow her humiliation, she discovers that their eldest daughter, Layla, is in a relationship with a young man from the university where she studies.
A forbidden love that could bring shame upon the entire family and against which she will fight. But Layla is ready to shake up the ancestral traditions that rule the village and to challenge the beliefs of everyone involved.
Despite her mother’s prohibition, the young girl goes her own way, determined to live her life as she pleases and with the man of her choice…
The women, of course, are the primary victims of this closed, immutable, and immobile world.
Jalila silently accepts her husband’s new wife, Suliman: it is the law. She prevents Layla, her eldest daughter, from meeting the student she is in love with: it is the rule. She only revolts when Suliman intends to marry Layla off to a young man from the tribe whom she considers dull and unworthy of her.
Within her, the idea of obedience, as all generations of women before her have done, clashes with the fear of a freedom whose unexpected arrival petrifies her.
Two generations of women face each other: women without influence in a profoundly patriarchal society, and a modern young generation opposed to the archaic traditions of their parents.
