A Teen-Age Girl’s Cell-Phone Video Sparks Desire and Coercion in “Sandstorm”

In 2009, Ghadeer Ahmed, an Egyptian teen-ager, recorded a video of herself dancing in a short dress at her friend’s house. It was the type of thing girls would do in private, behind closed doors. She shared the video and some photographs with her boyfriend. Three years later, after they had broken up, he started sending her threats. If she didn’t get back together with him, he’d post the video and photos online. It was this story that inspired Seemab Gul, a filmmaker who grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, to make her short film “Sandstorm.”

Hearing the story made Gul curious to see Ahmed’s dance, and when she did it sparked a realization. “It was so innocent and so sweet, and it was so sensual at the same time,” she said. “It dawned on me that when girls are growing up—when I was growing up—we didn’t have an idea of what is considered sexual in terms of our moves, our bodies, how to go about what can be public, what should remain private.” In “Sandstorm,” the main character, Zara, finds herself in a situation similar to Ahmed’s, and grapples with questions of privacy and coercion while navigating romance in the digital age.

Gul’s film opens with Zara dancing in a room and her friend recording on a phone. The scene is joyful and sensuous—a young person exploring and becoming aware of their own body. Her friend jokes that girls from good families don’t dance like that, nodding to social expectations. Later, Zara notices that a middle-aged man collecting laundry on a nearby rooftop is watching her, a jarring reminder of how a woman exists in external spaces: surveilled, objectified. Zara’s body is being projected onto with social assumptions before she even has a chance to explore and define it for herself.

Gul’s visual style accentuates that tension. Tight shots and small spaces keep the film intimate. We explore Zara’s interiority. But even in her most private moments, silhouetted in darkness, her face is intermittently illuminated by the flash of her phone, juxtaposing her inner self with the fact that she’s constantly being perceived and consumed.

The film follows Zara’s online relationship with a boy whom she regularly video-chats with but hasn’t yet met. Their budding romance seems benign, flirtatious, and hopeful. She tells him about her dancing and he asks to see. Zara’s finger hovers over her phone, deliberating, before she clicks Send. The video, a private artifact, is out of her control. Their online interactions turn increasingly uncomfortable and coercive after he saves the video, telling her it’s sexy but a little slutty, and posing the question, “What if this video leaks?” These subtle threats begin to exert a control over her, as she gives in to other demands. Sometimes they’re in direct conflict, indicating double standards—or, perhaps, simply his desire to exert control. “Send me [a photo] without your scarf,” he says. Later, he tells her, “I like women covered, especially in public. Will you wear a scarf over your head for me?”

Zara is walking a tightrope, navigating a conflicting set of ideas and rules about women’s desirability and shame. Gul sees this kind of coercion and the double standards around women’s sexuality as a struggle faced by women around the world. Gul now lives in the U.K., and she draws on experiences of her friends there and research about revenge-porn cases in Europe as much as on her own upbringing in Pakistan. But her storytelling is imbued with cultural notes she’s familiar with, and she particularly takes inspiration from Iranian art-house cinema and the ways Iranian storytelling resonated with her as a Pakistani. “We grew up on Bollywood films, and I think in India they like song and dance,” she told me. “Whereas we, culturally, in terms of literature and poetry, embrace tragedy.” Zara’s tense and unravelling situation in “Sandstorm” inherits some of those cultural ideas. Gul drew on the social realism and visual simplicity of Iranian art-house films, blending documentary and fiction to explore the ways that digital communication clashes with social customs.

It’s important to Gul that viewers recognize these issues don’t arise only in Muslim societies. “I was careful in not demonizing the Pakistani Muslim man,” she told me, expanding on how that narrative and a desire to “save women” in countries in the Muslim world has been a driving force behind war and occupation. Zara’s troubles are happening in a specific cultural context, but they’re also part of a much larger phenomenon. Gul wanted audiences to experience that frustration and sense of uncertainty, the looming sense that you’ve got in over your head and may be in trouble.

When we first see Zara and her online prospect on a call, she is asking him a series of questions, one of which is “choice or fate?” As Zara’s life increasingly spirals out of her control under the threat of being exposed, there’s no telling what the consequences could be. On the day of the planned meeting, a sandstorm blows through the city as she’s leaving school, and the boy is waiting outside to meet her. The meteorological whirlwind mirrors the one inside, and the stroke of fate gives Zara the opportunity to make a choice.