The UK’s largest festival of Arab cinema, SAFAR, presents a special screening of The Dam.

Sudan, near the Merowe Dam. Maher works in a traditional brickyard fed by the waters of the Nile. Every evening, he secretly wanders off into the desert to build a mysterious construction made of mud. While the Sudanese people rise to claim their freedom, his creation slowly starts to take a life of its own…

Visually striking and abstract, The Dam is the first feature film of Paris-based, Lebanese filmmaker and visual artist Ali Cherri. It is the third in a trilogy of stand-alone works linked by a theme that he describes as “the geographies of violence” - exploring how social and political crises become in some way embedded in the lands on which they unfold.