DANCE OF DUST

Out of what is to Western eyes barren terrain, the forbidding geopolitical landscape of post-revolutionary Iran, there has arisen a cinema of mastery and purity of vision, acknowledged worldwide for its qualities – and showcased here in such past works as “Reyhaneh” (15th CIFF, 1996). DANCE OF DUST exemplifies how such a fine film industry could be built on shifting sands. The sand grains themselves, the wind, water, fire, and earth are teh elemental voice and texture of this tone-poem-narrative set in a hinterlands community where the peasant inhabitants spend their days either transporting bricks of working in the mud that their patient hands will make into bricks. Ilia, a young kiln worker, falls in love with Limua, a girl who has come to live with her mother and labor at the brickworks herself – but only for the season. As the precious days go by, Ilia yearns for her and senses things in the air, in the furnace, like distant signals from other realms. Is there a way the two of them can make their desire as permanent as the bricks they forge? (No dialogue.)