Watch out, sand thieves are coming to the Proxima Competition of the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) next month. Yes, you read that right: sand thieves!

Bangladeshi screenwriter and director Mahde Hasan, who has made shorts I Am Time (2013), Death of a Reader (2017), and A Boring Film (2020), is bringing his feature film debut, Sand City, to the picturesque Czech spa town.

The cinematic tale promises daring visuals, which are kaleidoscopic and often make the story, and life, feel like shattered glass. It also promises a thought-provoking dissection of life in a big city, in this case, Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, which has a reputation as one of the most densely populated cities in the world.

The movie’s logline can be understood in that context. “Sand, an unstable element, reveals the life in a ruthless metropolis,” it reads.

The protagonists of the two parallel stories told in the film are a woman from an ethnic minority, portrayed by Victoria Chakma in her screen debut, and a man who is a member of the majority population, played by Bangladeshi actor Mostafa Monwar.

“Emma and Hasan don’t know each other, but they have much in common. Most importantly, they are both sand thieves,” reads a synopsis on the KVIFF website. “Emma steals it for kitty litter, Hasan for making homemade glass. One day, their lives are disrupted by the discovery of a severed finger, and they learn that the human psyche can shatter as easily as glass.”

In case you still expect a classic popcorn movie, the fest highlights the deeper and darker layers of human life that it explores. “It is an oppressive portrait of a city full of sand, blended with a stylistically refined elegy about the flow of time, personal privacy, destruction, and the tear-filled valleys of our inner worlds,” it emphasizes.

The cinematography of the film, for which Diversion is handling sales, comes from Mathieu Giombini, who has worked with such directors as Francois Ozon, Michel Piccoli, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, and Manoel de Oliveira.

Director Hasan explains in a director’s note that he wanted to “explore the many facets of urban survival, fantasy, and sexuality,” while also “exploring my own emotions” about the city and how it “constantly occupies my thoughts and creations.”

And he shares: “I have been photographing this city and the lives within it for almost a decade now. At first, my gaze was romantic and celebratory till I decided to probe even deeper and look beyond the obvious. Then, I realized the inherent claustrophobia of living in the city; the lives of people as if they were all locked inside their own abyss.”

Concludes Hasan: “I witnessed how the passage of time suffocates our daily lives. We all seemed to be locked within a trap where there is a need to hide ourselves and never had the courage to come out as we are, to speak as we feel. There is almost a crisis of faith, wherein the people have stopped trusting and believing in better days.”

He and Giombini opted for a look and feel inspired by some big names. “Mahde and I have often mentioned the cinema of the Portuguese director Pedro Costa, for his particular treatment of shadows and directions of light, but also of the American director David Lynch, who manages so well to interfere with the irrational, even the fantastic, quite simply, without resorting to expensive special effects, which we couldn’t afford anyway,” Giombini explains.

The aesthetics fit with the “fractured structure and form” that the director chose. “Dhaka, the city where I dwell, is like a collage of broken glass,” filmmaker Hasan concludes.

The trailer introduces the two people whose journey the movie follows and gives a first taste of the dreamy qualities of Sand City. “There’s no shortage of sand in this city,” protagonist Hasan is heard saying as he dreams of “huge profits.”

Watch the Sand City trailer below.