An Indian family’s reunion turns out to be built on sand
Photo: Our Share of Sand, Film4
Daniel Nelson
A 12-year-old girl takes on India’s huge and environmentally destructive illegal sand mining industry in a new film drama, Our Share of Sand.
Well, that is the film’s symbolic meaning. In fact, it focuses on one small mining company, run by her father, Rahul.
Maya has been living in Britain and has returned with her mother to their estranged husband and father and to the village where they once lived.
Father and daughter are getting on well in the comfortable house and as someone brought up outside her original culture she is free to act with comparative boldness. This freedom is fed by a budding friendship with a 14-year-old worker, Kira, who dives for sand. So this is also a coming of age story and a story about child labour.
Interested in her unaccustomed surroundings, and having been woken up by an unusual noise, she disobeys her dad and unobtrusively boards a boat making a mysterious night-time journey.
When the work team reaches a certain point and quietly cuts through a wire barrier, you know something is afoot.
What happens on that journey causes potentially dangerous anger in the village, unveils a shocking secret about the safety of young workers, undermines her father’s honesty, threatens the family reunion. Opens up a moral universe for Maya and, albeit indirectly, raises questions about sand mining generally.
It’s an environmental thriller, heightened and personalised by tricky family moral issues: is Maya sure about what she saw on the river at night? What should she tell the police? How will the family trio function now that mother and daughter know more about how the sand business functions? Is family loyalty really all-important? And, overall, what about low-wage and under-age workers in a country where the wealth and class gaps are so huge, and how do you weigh economic development against environmental destruction?
And on the subject of wealth, there’s an additional element to the story, about the discovery and loss of a large diamond. It brings an almost fairy tale touch to the drama, but enables director Shalini Adnani, born in Chile and of Indian origin, to round off a talented debut feature with a momentarily satisfying ending.
The film touches on more issues than it has time to explore, but benefits from keeping Maya’s growing moral dilemmas front and foremost. It’s predominantly personal rather than preachily political.