Shalini Adnani’s ‘Our Share of Sand’: Inside the Indian sand-mining story heading to Venice

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Chilean-Indian filmmaker Shalini Adnani’s ‘Our Share of Sand’ enters the 41st Venice International Critics’ Week as one of seven debut features competing in the section | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Chilean-Indian filmmaker Shalini Adnani’s Our Share of Sand enters the 41st Venice International Critics’ Week as one of seven debut features competing in the secstion. The film, which has its world premiere on September 4, follows 12-year-old Maya as she returns to rural India with her mother and reconnects with her estranged father, a sand-mining businessman whose operation employs young workers in hazardous conditions. An accident involving Maya’s friend and family help, Kiran, turns her into a witness to the family’s carefully maintained version of events.

Born in Chile to a Sindhi Indian family and now based in London, Shalini grew up moving between two cultures that gave her very different but equally intimate ideas of home. Her family’s roots brought her repeatedly to India, where she divided her time between Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Chennai, while Chile remained the other place that shaped her sense of belonging.

“I think I couldn’t separate those two identities for me as a person,” she says in a virtual interview with The Hindu . “I did grow up between two cultures that I actually love. I love Latin American culture and I love Indian culture. I almost feel like I’m pulled to pick one in a society or in a world that is constantly asking us to be binary and pick one or the other.”

Chilean-Indian filmmaker Shalini Adnani | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

That tension between belonging and observation is also built into Maya, played by newcomer Maya Mehta, whose place within the family gives her an intimate view of its privilege while her position as an outsider to the world around it leaves her unusually alert to what the adults have learned to accept. “The heart of Our Share of Sand came from my experiences going to India and spending time as a sort of NRI in the house,” Shalini says. “Understanding a country through the microcosm of a family,” was the thought behind Maya becoming close enough to inherit the family’s assumptions and young enough to still find their consequences difficult to absorb.

That family bubble also shaped what Shalini noticed outside it. In Our Share of Sand , Maya’s father is an industrialist whose cement business depends on the manual extraction of river sand, with workers diving into the riverbed to collect it by hand, exposing them to the physical dangers of barotrauma. When Maya joins one of her father’s nighttime mining trips, 14-year-old Kiran is sent underwater and fails to resurface, eventually emerging with ruptured eardrums and permanent hearing damage.