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Matty Brown’s film The Sand Castle presents a stark scene on a Mediterranean island, casting a stark view of a seemingly idyllic landscape. Jana (Riman Al Rafeea), a young girl, builds sand castles against a backdrop of hidden family struggles. The story explores trauma through her innocent perspective, revealing deep emotional complexities.

Brown, working with performers like Nadine Labaki and Ziad Bakri, creates a narrative that challenges viewers’ perceptions. The film examines how a picturesque setting can mask profound psychological tensions.

The work probes the refugee experience through a poetic visual language. It reveals the profound impact of external conflicts on a child’s inner world, presenting a raw exploration of survival and resilience. Jana’s sand castles become a metaphor for fragility and hope, capturing the nuanced experience of displacement and emotional survival.

The Shifting Sands of Reality: Navigating the Narrative of “The Sand Castle”

The Sand Castle...

A young girl named Jana is stranded with her family on a small patch of land somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. They’ve taken shelter in a lighthouse, where Jana spends her days playing in the sand while the family notices strange occurrences: Jana sees a body bag floating by the shore; her mother hears a radio broadcast confirming dozens of migrants have drowned between Greece and Turkey; their radio breaks, leaving them with no connection to the outside world. As they struggle to accept their fates, their circumstances deteriorate.

The Lebanese drama The Sand Castle, from director Matty Brown (2020’s The Distraction), follows this family of four as their pasts are slowly revealed, while their futures hang in the balance. Starring Oscar nominee Nadine Labaki, Ziad Bakri, and Zain and Riman Al Rafeea, the film was written by Brown, Hend Fakhroo (The Waiting Room), and Yassmina Karajah (Rupture). This...

Director Matty Brown’s psychological drama, The Sand Castle, offers a harrowing look at the crude reality of armed conflicts around the world—how the greed of warmongers affects the lives of generations to come—leaving children rootless and without identity. The poignant tone of the movie is amplified by the choice of narrative treatment, as the beautiful, imaginative perspective of a child guides viewers through the story, the horrors of reality continue to reveal themselves through occasional cracks in the imagination, until the final moments of the movie bring out the agonizing truth. The four members of the family, and their actions, are presented through an intermingling of layers of reality and imagination. It was a daunting task to pull off, given the unique demands of the script. Additionally, there are subtle allusions to real-world events, which the actors needed to convey without committing to anything specific. Thankfully, the...

Netflix’s The Sand Castle follows the perspective of a young girl named Jana (Riman Al Rafeea) stuck on an isolated island with her family. The family of four was likely shipwrecked after a devastating incident at sea, and through a radio in their possession, they have been trying to contact anyone who can pick up the signal. From the very beginning, the film used its characters to point out that the island wasn’t real and the family was surrounded by water on all sides. Their lifeboat was slowly sinking in the face of the rising waves around them, and they had no way to survive the odds unless someone spotted them in the vastness of the ocean.

Spoiler Alert

So, yes, the island and the lighthouse weren’t real at all, and they were just a figment of Jana’s imagination, which she used to create a favorable...

Short Film Review: WAShhh (2024) by Mickie Lai

Lee Kah Giap’s black-and-white cinematography works quite well here, adding in a way, to the tension that is instigated by both the story and Wong Kai Yun’s sharp editing, in a film that scores quite high on production values overall. “WAShhh” is a great film, that manages to communicate a series of comments and a very entertaining story/event in just over 20 minutes. What becomes evident, is that Lai is more than ready to shoot a feature, perhaps even with the same theme.

Video Interviews: Mowaffaq Alobaid Short Film Review: Saint Rose (2024) by Zayn Alexandre

The cinematography is rather polished, in a way that mirrors the spotlessness of the house, making the aforementioned comment more intense, with the tension, however, coming more from the acting and the sound than the visuals. The editing results in a fast tempo that allows the...

“The Sand Castle” is made up of intentionally simple elements: an abandoned island, a creaky old lighthouse, an intermittently working radio. And at its center is a family of four: a doting mother, a resourceful father, a moody teen son and a daydreaming daughter. Their survival depends on the increasingly Sisyphean task of waiting and scavenging, hoping and praying. Help, they hope, will soon come their way. But what at first feels like a modern-day “Robinson Crusoe” adventure soon turns into something darker and altogether more timely. While Matty Brown’s dreamy film plays more like a children’s fable than the harrowing thriller it sometimes flirts with becoming, its oblique stab at storytelling ends up muddling its ambitious vision and well-intended message.

Survival stories hinge on the grit and resilience of its characters. Food is scarce and fresh water elusive. Sleep is near impossible and shelter close to untenable.

It has been known for some time, but it turns out that the main way Netflix picks its content is through an algorithm that calculates the popularity value of the cast among other things. As such, having “Capernaum”’s Nadine Labaki and Zain Al Rafeea might be what propelled the streamer to pick “The Sandcastle” for its Middle East program, along with the fact that the theme seems to be about Palestine. It turns out, however, that the algorithm can make mistakes, and that star quality is not always enough. Let us take a closer look though.

The Sandcastle is screening at Red Sea Film Festival

A family of four, Nabil, Yasmine and their children, Adam and Jana, find themselves stranded on an island that looks both picturesque and post-apocalyptic, with the ominous presence of a lighting house playing a crucial role in both actually. The reasons for them being there are not exactly clear,...