A keenly observed class drama shown through the eyes of a child, Shalini Adnani’s “Our Share of Sand” overcomes its characters’ narrow construction through its brooding intensity. Set against a sand-mining crisis in modern India, it tells of a 12-year-old British Asian girl, Maya (Maya Mehta), who returns to the country to join her industrialist father Rohan (Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub), and bears witness to a routine accident in his line of work. As notions of justice, power and inequity begin to shade her peripheral vision, Maya is torn between speaking out and adhering to the moral compartmentalization that goes hand in hand with her family’s generational success.
Adnani, a Chilean-born Londoner of Indian descent, draws on her memories of visiting India as a young outsider in crafting the film’s atmosphere, and her protagonist’s confined perspective. Such an approach runs the risk of gawking at an unfamiliar people, their hegemonies and their ways of life, even with the best intentions. But by rooting her tale in Maya’s family ties, the writer-director explores the complicity of well-to-do South Asian diasporas, and the foundations that afford them the luxury of emigrating in the first place. It begins with a brief, poetic prologue set decades ago — seemingly outside of time — as obscured day-laborers sift through sandy riverbanks and discover an enormous diamond. Their faces remain hidden, as a debate ensues about whether they should alert their boss to its discovery.
The next time we see this diamond, in a contemporary setting, Maya’s stern paternal aunt, Arti (Jyoti Dogra), shows it off while regaling her with their family’s mythology, wherein her grandfather discovered the gem and sold a fragment of it to uplift them after postcolonial partition. It’s worth noting that the aforementioned quandary, about alerting the laborers’ boss, is never answered: Did the grandfather really find the diamond himself, as a worker, or did he simply claim it from his employees?
There’s no way to prove the veracity of this “bootstraps” creation myth, a lingering doubt that informs the film’s saga of cyclical inequality. This initially takes unassuming form, as Maya grows friendly with Kiran (Krish Raj More), a boy of a similar age. There’s already a division between them — Maya doesn’t speak much Hindi or Marathi (the local language), while Kiran doesn’t speak English, though they just about understand each other — which is only reinforced when Maya’s father scolds Kiran to get back to work.
The adolescent turning out to be in Rohan’s employ ought to come as no surprise: Caste and class remain inflexible facets of Indian society, including on the outskirts of Mumbai, where the film is set. Kiran, dismissively treated, is one of Rohan’s divers, and a vital manual laborer in the cement production chain laying the foundation for India’s modern development. It isn’t long before Rohan’s regulation-skirting methods leads to an accident by nightfall, which leaves Kiran permanently injured. This in turn leads Maya (a key witness) and her British Indian mother Priti (Ellora Torchia) to quietly question what they ought to say to the police — if anything at all.
Although the film never gives its divisions a name — much of it unfolds through Maya’s sheltered perspective — its setting provides the perfect symbolism for a nation built on discrimination. Caste becomes a silent killer, as the expectations foisted upon Rohan’s workers collide with subdued pleas for their humanity. (Some of them are understandably furious, but others know there’s only so much they can say.) Granted, most characters barely exist outside the confines of the plot, and how they relate to social strata is their defining characteristic. We know little about Maya’s life before her arrival, or Kiran’s outside his work, or the family beyond their casual cruelty. But within this storytelling paradigm, Adnani imbues each scene with a dramatic wrath bubbling just beneath the surface.
This tension is often subtext enough, and it’s accentuated by cinematographer Adric Watson’s tight and dirty frames, which confine Maya and Arti through astute visual composition, as the reality of their cushy lives is gradually illuminated. There’s also occasional use of night photography, by way of the family compound’s security cameras where you wouldn’t expect them, gesturing at a thematic handshake between the upkeep of caste superiority and fascistic surveillance. It’s the closest “Our Share of Sand” gets to casting a wide net over India’s contemporary political milieu, and while this facet remains largely unexplored, the film’s confining focus on Maya’s point of view pays a number of dramatic dividends.
Not only does Mehta deliver a stunning debut performance, as a young girl perturbed by the world and her place within it, but the film’s sinister, shadowy tone makes even natural spaces feel imposing. The result is a twisted, naturalistic fairytale about structural realities; with the right boot-heel at one’s neck, even ostensibly life-giving forces like forests and rivers can be turned against innocent people.
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