The House of Sand (2005)
The House of Sand or Casa de Areia (2005) is a Brazilian Portuguese film that was part of a Brazil Film Festival by ICAF. The film had won over 12 awards including Sundance Film Festival in 2006. It had unpretentious characters and a simple story line but leaves you spellbound.
The story happens in 1910, when in a far-away desert in Brazil, months away from the nearest civilization. A pregnant-lady and her old mother is brought to be settled there by her husband. Unfortunately, things don’t go as per his plan, his servants run away, the family is marooned there and shortly he dies leaving behind the two ladies to defend themselves in an ocean of sand. The lady gives birth there to a daughter and spends the next six decades there, trying to leave the place forms the remainder. The story moves forward in leaps of ten to twenty years period at once.
We are literally transported to the white sand desert and can feel the windstorms and the dry air, that’s how well made the cinematography was. There are hardly a pageful of dialogues in total. The excellent acting by the lead characters and brilliant direction by Andrucha Waddington conveys the story and keeps us gripped. There are sequences of scientist visiting the place for its clear to do their measurement for proving that light bends around the sun during a solar eclipse in 1919.
Originally published at https://venkatarangan.com on October 9, 2020.
