Soul of Sand (Sidharth Srinivasan, 2010): India

Reviewed by My Eklund. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival 2011.

Soul of Sand takes place in India. The main protagonist sits alertly outside a silica mine every day as a watchman. However, the place is abandoned. The man follows his master’s every command, certain that his very life depends on his duties. The master is trying to sell the silica mine, but when things don’t go as he wants to, he rapes the watchman’s wife. The master tries to marry his daughter away, but she doesn’t want to marry this man, so she runs away with her boyfriend. A wicked man hunts them down.

The film is very colorful which makes us pay attention to it. It opens up with a green, open field and then the next shot is a master shot of the city with a dark environment, chimneys, hard working people etc. The next shot is the master shot of the watchman sitting outside the silica mine. Cows are walking by which emphasizes that they are more important and, more importantly, they are moving forward. This is also highlighting the holiness of cows in India. This shot sets the stage for the film. It’s a long still camera shot. It cuts to a close-up of the man looking straight, not even getting bothered by a fly.

The filmmakers choose to have a lot of still and long shots, which means that the actors have to be focused on conveying emotions to the audience, which they are successful with. The cinematography was the best part of this film. Even though a low quality camera was used, which makes the film look worse and can also be an injustice to the actors. Even though they are conveying emotions to the audience, it looks like the actors are trying too hard. It doesn’t look natural.

There were a couple of things that occurred in the film that didn’t make sense to me, or more so it felt like shots were missing. For example, in one shot the watchman’s wife stabs the master with a knife after he raped her in the silica mine. The next shot you see is of her husband running to the silica mine, screaming after her. It cuts to the master standing outside by a tractor, crying. Then the following shot is of the husband looking down at his wife, while she lies dead on the floor. The master did hit her head into a grid, but she could still stand up and stab the master with a knife. Another example is when the masters’ daughter finds out that the evil man who haunted them killed her boyfriend.  She rips of his headwear and her expression tells the audience that it is something very frightening on his face. We want to see what it is she sees, and you’re waiting to see what he has under his headwear throughout the rest of the film, but it never gets shown.

The storyline was bad; the acting was not as good as I expected it to be. I would only give this film credit for its mise-en-scene and editing, because it’s a bit difficult to keep the audience suspense when there are long and still shots, but the filmmaker’s succeeded with that. The film is mirroring the class system in India, which I found very interesting. Sidharth Srinivasan did approach this in a good way as he show three different class groups and how people treat each other after those.