Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

httpmom Maybe it's a male/female perspective (the mother daughter relationships were so spot on), or an American/Brazilian difference in perspective, but I can not understand all the negative comments on the board regarding this movie! To me it is a haunting little masterpiece I will not soon forget. The standout acting, the stunning yet eerie landscape setting, the subtle plot, and the music are reminiscent of Kurosawa's deeply minimal but hugely philosophical dramas. Add to that, a brilliantly BIG viewfinder of a camera and a really superb space science sub plot this movie is almost epic. I was surprised by it's simplicity and astonished by it's depth. The director may be young but his soul is ever so old.

Chris Knipp In Brazilian director Andrucha Waddington's House of Sand/Casa de Areia a mother and her grown daughter, Áurea, are brought into the desert in 1910 by Áurea's husband, an old man named Vasco de Sá (Ruy Guerra) leading a group of pioneers seeking a property and are forced to settle in a place where there's a little water but nothing save sand in every other direction. The opening sequence of the people and their animals seen from a distance struggling along in a dark line in the white landscape, with the clanging sounds of the troupe's carts and beasts disproportionately loud in our ears, is a starkly beautiful, if self-conscious one.The daughter immediately discovers she's pregnant and wants to go home. She never does, though, and the film moves along depicting her wilderness existence in brief sequences, skipping forward by decades between them. A pair of Brazilian actresses who are in fact mother and daughter play the two women. They're Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres, respectively – and they're a powerhouse team: Montenegro received an Oscar nomination for her starring role in Walter Salles' Central Station and Torres won the Best Actress Award at Cannes in 1986. House of Sand is a movie in which women play the heroic roles and men are, alternately, obstacles, temporary lovers, or recessive helpers. (Despite the feminine sound of his first name, the director is a man, but his screenplay was written by a woman, Elena Soárez.) If it's studiously lacking in such conventional palliatives as a David Lean soundtrack, House of Sand was nonetheless shot in a wide aspect ratio that emphatically sets off the harsh beauty of the landscape of a nature preserve in the Brazilian state of Maranhao where all the shooting was done. The print is so monochromatic you may forget it's in color but its special tonalities and ultra-sharp look make it eye-candy. The sound track of remixer Mark Berger is also striking and unusual, and in it music plays a tiny but enormously significant role for one of the main characters.Soundtrack and image take the leading roles because Waddington emerges as more interested in setting and in his film's the formal elements, than in story. He's relatively careless with his characters, and with his audience's ability to follow his sudden time shifts – these decade-long leaps forward that come on us unawares, without any titles or other guidelines by way of warning. This offhand approach to narrative becomes downright jarring when Waddington "ages" Torres' character by having her suddenly begin to be played by Montenegro. Mother and daughter the two actresses may be, but their faces are distinctive and dissimilar. You may feel the projectionist has gotten the reels switched around. It's a very telling piece of information that Waddington's starting point wasn't a story, but a photograph of a house buried in the sand somewhere. He didn't even see the shot himself, but the minute he heard about it the idea grabbed him. He decided he want to make a movie to explain how it came about. And there is a moment when a character returns from a trip and indeed finds a scene like that snapshot.Situations are established visually rather than fully explored. It's hard to believe the two women are really even living in this place. Unlike the people of Zacharias Kunuk's Atanarjuat, for example – to name another movie shot in a stark, remote place – these women don't have an ancient culture that includes survival skills for the landscape they occupy. In a story not so unlike Robinson Crusoe, almost all the specific details of daily vicissitude and survival that enliven Defoe's famous narrative are omitted. We see one of the women rinse out a shirt; we see them listlessly bring pieces of fish up to their mouths and drink greedily from glasses of water. We see many close-ups of their faces – and both women have interesting, gnarly visages that they know how to turn them into expressive masks of suffering and stoicism – but that's not enough to establish that they've acquired survival skills. Does Massu (Seu Jorge; later Luiz Melodia), the son of an escaped slave who adopts them, provide for their every need? The sudden jumps forward of a decade at a time are a neat way of avoiding any exploration of daily life. Maria, the young daughter, says she has nothing to do. How so? How do you live in a wilderness and have nothing to do? It doesn't seem as though this was very well thought out. According to TimeOut New York, this is "a movie that's been referred to as 'a perpetual bleach job for the art-house mind.'" Mexican director Ricardo Benet's 2005 News from Afar /Noticias lejanas has the same nowhere starting point as House of Sand but it provides a more evocative experience because it's grounded in a wealth of character and incident. News's settlement becomes believable, and its main character's grounding in reality is further strengthened by a long second sequence in which he goes off to live in Mexico City. Compared to Benet's film, Waddington's chooses more to remain in the art-house realm of poetry or meditation rather than ground itself in recognizable experience. Lisandro Alonso's Los Muertos and the films of Carlos Reygada are other examples of Latin American film-making that edgy and outside the mainstream but has a strong punch of gritty reality.The successive jumps from WWI to WWII to 1969 do, however, have some of the sweep of the awesome sandy landscape. And with its bursts of sudden passion, stark conflict, and terrible longing, the movie has some touching and powerful moments, particularly in the final scene in which the young daughter, the one of the three generations who's escaped to the city, returns, grown old now (Montenegro plays both roles this time) in 1969 to see her aged mother and tells her that man has walked on the moon.

angel_a-2 I loved this movie because it is fully of truthful contrasts. The larger story portrays the passing of time and immense global changes through war, scientific and technological advances. Everything changes, yet stays the same. Regardless of the generation, youth longs for excitement and change, while time brings calmness and acceptance of circumstance. The most amazing part is all is that the passing of time is portrayed from within an oasis in the middle of sand dunes where the sands of time pass slowly yet surely. This contrast, and the circumstances that bring the characters there, leave the audience wondering witch they would choose, the simple, calm, and relaxed life of the sand, or the stressful, competitive, yet object filled life in the city.It's important to stay sharp to catch the change in generations because the actresses remain the same throughout, but this only adds to the story's message once you figure it out. I gave it a 10

Red-125 "Casa de Areia" (2005), shown in the U.S. as "House of Sand," was directed by Andrucha Waddington. It stars his wife and his mother-in- law playing roles written with them in mind. In 1910, in the arid Brazilian region of Maranhão, an older man has bought land and brought settlers with the thought of establishing a small colony. Within the opening minutes of the film, the man has died and everyone else has run off. His pregnant wife, Aurea (Fernanda Torres), and her mother (Torres' real life mother, Fernanda Montenegro), are left stranded and deserted by everyone. Their desperate attempts to escape this trap, and to cope with the harsh conditions, make up the remainder of the movie.Montenegro is ageless, Torres is incomparable, and they are both outstanding actors. The plot is frustrating, just as "Woman of the Dunes" was frustrating. These women are not helpless incompetents. They are brave, intelligent, and resourceful. However, bad luck, fate, and the incredibly harsh conditions of this region combine to make escape difficult, if not impossible.This film is unusual, creative, and worth seeking out. Just be sure to bring a bottle of water with you to your seat when you watch it.