Midday in the desert. The sun is beating down and a dry desert wind is blowing. Jalila, a 42-year-old mother in a typical Bedouin family in Israel, is struggling not to let the disappointment she feels show on her face. She is preparing for her husband’s wedding to a second wife who is 20 years her younger. Leila, Jalila’s 18-year-old daughter, is also trying to act as if everything is fine, but for different reasons. She is involved in a forbidden love affair with a foreign Bedouin, which has been discovered. The Israeli film “Sand Storm,” in Hebrew Sufat Chol, shows how mother and daughter come to terms with the new reality. Both women understand that they have to cooperate. In the patriarchal society of the Bedouin tribes of the Negev the women have to submit.
The film scored Israeli director Elite Zexer, who also wrote the screenplay, the coveted Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Dramatic section at the...
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