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‘The Sand Castle’ Review: Muddled, if Well-Meaning Fable Gets Lost in Its Own Fanciful Imagery
Matty Brown's 'The Sand Castle,' premiering at the Red Sea Film Festival, is too cagey to function as a message movie on the refugee crisis.
But in “The Sand Castle,” Brown (working from a script he co-wrote with Hend Fakhroo and Yassmina Karajah), doesn’t stay close to the adults bringing what little food they can to the table, nor to the teenager who scoffs at the hopeless predicament they all find themselves in. No, the focus stays mostly on Jana (Riman Al Rafeea), the young girl who spends her days wandering the beaches she’s now resigned herself to calling home, building sand castles and making friends with ants she encounters in the grass. Dreamy perhaps to a fault, and featuring some striking visuals throughout, this poetic ode to the resilience of children’s imaginative play in the face of trauma is more intriguing as a concept than as a film; urgent as a political plea, but ultimately much too insular in its storytelling to land as firmly as it should.
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