Ecrans de Sable

Directed by Randa Chahal Sabbag

A city emerges in the middle of the desert and dies in its richness. Women are doubly veiled, and freedoms are even more threatened. Sarah was born the day after the oil boom. She is part of the generation that believes it can get anything with the power of money, and that simultaneously sees its every desire thwarted when it conflicts with the strict laws of its country. She is unsettled by the triviality of her life and unsettles others through her beauty, and her will to push everything to its extreme. She fears not the desert, not the wind, nothing. Her thirst lies elsewhere: to leave the desert, which she hates, and in which she is kept against her will. She wanders the empty streets in her limousine, killing time on the phone, provoking strangers. Gradually, tensions arise in this desert, instilling a latent anguish interrupted by bursts of happiness, of ecstatic laughter, and of sensuality, until everything comes to a head.