Main character of the film “Le Damage”, by Ali Cherri, presented at the fortnight of the directors of the 75th edition of the Festival, the Sudanese, at 32, begins to dream of the future.
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Monday, Maher left the brickyard where he worked, in Méroé, the ancient city of Nubia, in Sudan. He kissed his wife, who has to give birth in three weeks; took the bus for Khartoum – six o’clock through the desert -, then an airplane for Istanbul and, from there, another for Nice. It was the first time that he left the edge of the Nile, where he saw his hands plunged into this clay, black from the river silt, from which the construction material is drawn over there. And that’s how we found him, beautiful as a prince, straight like an I, observing the Cannes agitation with an angel smile. At 32, Maher El Khair is the hero of the film Le Dam, by Ali Cherri, presented at the Directors’ Fortnight.
“The hero”: this is how it is now called, at home, in Meroé. Since, in December 2017, Maher El Khair met a young Lebanese who landed in the village, bag on his back, with a camera. He first took it for one of these tourists – rather rare – who come to visit the ruins of the Nubian pyramids. But the man explained to him that it was the immense dam that Omar Al-Bachir, the former dictator, had built upstream by the Chinese, who interested him. Ali Cherri, it was his name, was an artist and videographer, he explained to him, and he worked on the water.
Intelligence of the senses
This will come back several times. For his artistic work – he obtained the silver lion at the Venice Biennale, in April, with a video triptych on the dam: The Milk of Dreams: Of Men and Gods and Mud -, but also because the meeting with Maher, and this dazzling contrast between the green shores of the river and the merciless desert that surrounds him, inspired him the idea of a fiction film.
Maher the character, illegally offers to be Maher the actor. He who tells with a gourmet smile his love of James Bond, Jackie Chan or Jason Statham in the carrier, caresses the idea of playing. Beautiful kid, a seducer (expressive sigh when he asked him), handball player in the province team, the young man discovered cinema on the wired chains with his parents; In the cafes of the neighboring city, Karima, where a few chairs around a television station are enough to improvise sessions, or in the sole room in the region, the rare times he traveled four hours by road until Dongola, to attend a projection.
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