Dreams of Dust (2006) User Reviews

Personal experiences in the Sahel

[georgiaboy · 7/10 · 27 January 2007]

I was able to see this film at the Sundance Film Festival, where the director afterward made poignant commentary on the film, his first work. The movie is set in northern Burkina Faso, where a man from neighboring Niger unexpectedly shows up to work long, hard hours in a gold mine for basically nothing. He has evidently experienced some tragedy in the past, which often haunts him as he goes about his daily tasks. The film explores the man's ability to cope with past mistakes while ensuring a better future for those around him.

The film itself is beautifully filmed on location, mostly with Burkinabe or other west Africans. The film does a good job of capturing the misery that is most Burkinabe's lives. The director wanted to send the message that Burkina Faso, like many African nations, has the opportunity to be wealthy, but has problems with foreign intervention and greed, and local corruption. This theme is heavy throughout the movie. However, the film does run a bit slow, with many instances of scenes where nothing is going on for several minutes. If you are an artsy, foreign film lover, than you will probably like this film. If not, it is unlikely that it will capture your attention.

Infusing dignity and elegance to African cinema

[JuguAbraham · 8/10 · 18 January 2009]

The opening sequence of films often indicates the quality of cinema that follows. Writers and journalists are aware that they need to grab the attention of the reader at the outset, not later, if they have to win longer-term attention. In Laurent Salgues' debut feature film Dreams of dust, the opening sequence will remain an amazing one—-one that sets the tone for what would eventually follow.

The opening shot is of the rural, dusty, semi-arid Burkina Faso, a West African country on the fringes of the massive Saharan desert, an area known to many as the Sahel. The viewer doesn't see anyone for a while. Not even animals seem to inhabit the horizon. In the foreground, the viewer sees mounds of dust, like anthills. Suddenly you see, dust-covered humans emerge from holes in the ground, like rats emerging from their holes. These are prospectors digging in archaic mine-shafts (now apparently banned in Burkina Faso) for gold in a god-forsaken part of Africa. That opening shot reminds you of a choreographed musical—only there is no music, only silence broken by the sounds of workers' tools. The workers are emerging after toiling underground for several hours constantly at the risk of being buried alive with no one to rescue them if the mine ever caves in. They would leave behind widows and fatherless children, if that were ever to happen.

"Dreams of dust" is an important film on Africa. First, it exhibits the vigor and competence of a talented French director making a debut feature film armed with his very own script that evolved from an initial idea of a documentary on the lives of these gold miners hunting for gold under unusual circumstances. Second, it is a film made by a European on a real sub-Saharan African subject in a real location. The film is able to raise the cinematic content to a level above mere actions and words (say, compared to the recent award-winning Chadean film "Daratt" or Dry Season) as it gradually transforms into a metaphysical cinematic essay on the continent's people, their dreams, their despair, and their infrequent quests for a deeper meaning of their trials and tribulations and an eventual resolution of personal loss in this transient life. Third, it is a film that does not end with the typical hero and heroine riding out into the setting sun, but instead offers an end that would evoke feelings in the viewer's mind that are similar to those while viewing the end of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: a Space Odyssey," although the visuals in the two films couldn't be more starkly dissimilar. Fourth, it underscores the dignity and integrity of the sensitive and pensive African, rarely captured on film or in literature that transcends physical strength. Finally, it attempts to poetically bring on screen the King-Arthur-like quest of a Holy Grail at the end of the film leaving an open end for the viewer and filmmaker alike, alluding to the literal meaning of the word "Sahel," which in Arabic means "the shore" as the hero symbolically, as in a mirage, walks into the desert.

The film is a story of a male Nigerien (from Niger, not Nigeria) gold prospector seeking to make a fortune in gold in the neighboring country Burkina Faso. He is an intriguing individual, tall, strong, and an honest worker. He is also a "man with a past". The film does not reveal much about him; only that he was once a farmer, was married and had a daughter. He is evidently a person with heroic qualities that separate him from his co-workers. He does get attracted to a local attractive woman and her girl child, who naturally remind him of his own family. While several strands of the film are incredibly close to stories that made Westerns and Hollywood films so successful at the box office, Salgues deals with the subject in a way Hollywood would never attempt to shape, by injecting dignity and detachment in the principal character to the world around him. Towards the final half hour of the film, the story evolves from a mere "sweat-and-blood" tale of an expatriate into a metaphysical, psychological tale of a man seeking redemption from some sad events in his past. The film makes the viewer to ponder over the common dream of the African immigrant to acquire wealth. Here the African immigrant is not in USA or in Europe but in a neighboring Sahelian country. Here is a fascinating tale of a farmer with money in his pocket opting to become a voluntary slave in a tough environment, quite confident that he will eventually get to his pot of gold. The gold mine could suggest a metaphoric transit point in a long personal journey in the life of a thinking individual, if not the average African immigrant.

There are social pointers in the film that a viewer is not likely to miss. The fatherless girl plays with a doll but interestingly the face of the doll is blackened. The tyrannical boss of the mine is eventually replaced by a hardworking miner who is more understanding to the workers—-perhaps suggesting the waves of change taking place on the continent. However, the title of the film reiterates the intent of the director/writer Salgues. Would the dreams of the African really lead to gold or would it lead to dust? The optimistic film shows both taking place, to different individuals, in different ways.

Detached Beauty

[brujavu · 7/10 · 17 September 2012]

This has to be the yellowest film ever made... landscapes of yellow dust, huts made of yellow straw, men wearing yellow clothes (or more likely, clothes covered with yellow dust)... even the sky is yellow. The only splashes of other colors come in the clothing of the occasional woman. All this makes for a visually interesting effect, much like those old black and white photographs with colors painted on by hand to highlight certain areas. I found this film very interesting, not having been exposed previously to anything about gold mining in Africa, and was not expecting the kind of conditions that it depicts. The portrayal of the characters was done with a lot of dignity, and many themes were touched upon, but neither the themes nor the characters were explored with any depth, which has the effect of making the viewer feel detached from what is happening on screen, although in spite of that, I was able to forget that I was watching a film and enjoy the experience. Perhaps this was intentional. I was quite disappointed that the film didn't seem to have a real conclusion, although, there wasn't really anything to conclude. But real life is not necessarily a series of beginnings and conclusions to stories, and I think this has to be taken as a slice of life. It is definitely worth watching, just to experience a different quality of life.

The best film I've seen out of Burkina Faso . . .

[pixrox1 · 6/10 · 22 February 2013]

. . . though perhaps the worst, too, as I think this could be the only one I've run across from there. I did not learn anything about BF while going to school K-18. However, I once had a computer Mah Jongg game in which the backs of the tiles were the flags of various countries, which is how I first came across the name "Burkina Faso." At the time, I thought this was a cool name for a country, and I still think so. Unfortunately, I don't know what these two words mean, and this movie doesn't tell, either. Worse yet, it is in French, so one has to decipher subtitles to try to understand it. Further, all the characters are black people (making racist comments about white people now and then), and their names are not French (like "Pierre" or "Marie"). They are simply strings of letters impossible to pronounce, and not as short or predictable as even those long names you see in the credits of all the Thai movies out nowadays. For instance, the doctor who bandages Mocktar's leg injury is played by an actor named Ngonn Dingainlemgoto Alram Nguebnan! The one cool aspect of this film is the actual gold mines, which consist of tiny whack-a-mole type slits in a grouping of desert mogul bumps through which the barefoot miners descend 120 feet equipped with a sack, a rock hammer, and cheap flashlights attached to their head scarves, never knowing whether they will find enough air to breathe or be buried by a collapsing shaft. If they're lucky enough to make it to the service with a bag of gold ore, they must then pulverize it by hand with a mortar and pestle. Watch this if you want to see what life in the 1100s was like.

Doesn't go deep enough

[trochesset · 6/10 · 4 April 2010]

Alright, Dreams of Dust.

SPoilers ahead

I must say that I was less satisfied with Dreams of Dust than I was with Yeelen or Waiting for Happiness.

Its about a man running from his past. He comes to Mali to mine Gold. He was a farmer in Niger, but he had to leave after his daughter dies of Malaria. I think that the film implies that his wife and other children have already died, but its not made perfectly clear.

The film opens with a beautiful shot of a landscape covered in dust, and as the wind blows a dust cloud along, the characters and setting of the film are revealed, like the pulling back of a curtain. A great wordless opening.

You have Moctar, the main character, Thiam, who acts as his father figure, and Coumba and her daughter Marianne who function as the central characetrs. There are 2 or 3 other minor characters who speak a few words, but aren't central to the story, other than serving as a means for the director to convey a few more thing to the audience about the main character.

Moctar takes a liking to Coumba, whose husband died mining a few years prior to his arrival.

One day Moctar hurts himself while watching Coumba, and has to visit the doctor. I didn't really see the relevance in this scene, other than to have the doctor explain to us that blue- blues is alcohol mixed with amphetamines.

Moctar befriends Coumba and her daughter, and Coumba tells him of her desire to send her daughter away to Paris to get an education. After finding a nugget of gold, Moctar gives them the money they need for the both of them to leave for Paris.

At the end we see him mixing up some blue-blues, and then he sees Marianne running through the street. He follows her out of the village, and into the desert. I don't know if this was a hallucination, or a symbolic image. Is he going to follow her and her mother to Paris, or is he going to wander out into the desert and die?

This is a very dry description of a film, that does contain more life than this, but the telling of the story carries no kind of dramatic weight. We don't really see much of the thought put into any of Moctar's decisions, we only watch him meditate on them after he has made them.

The film has a plot, but not a very strong one. Let me make this clear, this is not the kind of film that does not have a plot, or is built of only vignettes. This is not "The Mirror" or even "Waiting for Happiness". There is a traditional story here. In "Waiting for Happiness", there is the story of the main character wanting to leave, but he is but a small player in that film. The other characters in Waiting for Happiness are more fully developed than those in "Dreams of Dust", and the existence of a plot makes me wish that if the characters are not going to be more fully developed, that I could at least get be treated to an interesting plot.

For me, I wish that the film would have gone one way or the other, traditional plot of vignettes about the ensemble cast. Also, for me, a film must have memorable moments, and while there is some fine cinematography here, aside from the opening sequence of wind driven dust, there are not many magical moments in the film. One might say that the last scene was magical, but for me, it was too confusing, at least upon this initial viewing, for me to consider the final scene satisfying.

4/8

Don't miss seeing this rare and beautiful film.

[film_ronin · 10/10 · 4 February 2007]

Director Laurent Salgues' 'Buried Dreams', opens with the strange sight of people emerging from the earth, as if planted there. This the first among many dream-like images, from Cinematographer Crystel Fournier that Salgues uses to draw us into a cinematic netherworld, skirting the line between the fantastic and a world that at times seems all too real: gritty, greedy and dangerous. The camera also reveals the landscape of an internal world, written on the faces and etched in the hearts and minds of his characters. 'Buried Dreams' is a semi-allegorical tale, its 'Everyman' is Mocktar, played with dignity and nobility by Makena Diop. Mocktar is a refugee from Niger, a 'man with a past'- like so many of classic film/literary characters: men not particularly striving for anything as much as escaping themselves through struggle and survival. Mocktar seeks employment in an Essakane mining camp, run by a greedy, and cowardly buffoon.

Here 'mines' are holes in the desert, dug straight down without supports or safety equipment. Miners are given flashlights that they strap to their heads for light and digging tools.

All of Mocktar's co-workers are digging for tiny scraps of gold in order to survive, but we learn that they are seeking a currency of another kind, dreams of a better life: marriage, escape & education, restoration of family fortune. In other words, hope. Mocktar befriends Coumba (played with quiet strength by Fatou Tall-Salgues) a young window & mother, attempting to raise her young daughter, amid the squalor and poverty of a desert work camp. Coumba dreams of sending her small daughter away to Paris, to get an education and a better life.

Don't miss seeing this rare and beautiful film.

Laurent Salgues shows us how a man's love for gold might induce him to be reduced to dust.

[FilmCriticLalitRao · 10/10 · 8 July 2009]

Dreams of dust is a wonderful film whose title has metaphoric richness. The title is apt as throughout the entire film we witness a ruthless, sensible struggle carried out by poor,hapless people in order to gain prosperity which would enable them to escape from the clutches of poverty.This film is set in Africa and makes a highly effective use of African landscape especially in the scenes where nature comes face to face with human beings.It is for this reasons that scenes involving dust and mines have been shot with great care,insight,maturity and wisdom.In his first film,French director Laurent Salgues has worked hard to give a heart and a soul to the image of Africa.The proof of his genius is evident in the manner he has highlighted the plight of poor African miners who are unable to possess gold for themselves even though there are numerous occasions when they get a chance to own the lucrative yellow metal.Africa has been shown in all its vivid details which enables viewers to establish a sensitive parallel between gold and dust.