U.S. director Matty Brown’s allegorical drama “The Sand Castle,” which sees Lebanese multi-hyphenate Nadine Labaki reunite on screen with young “Capernaum” siblings Zain and Reman Al Rafeea – who are both Syrian refugees – will be released globally on Jan. 24 by Netflix at a critical time in the Middle East.
With Israel-Hamas ceasefire talks currently underway and uncertainties still looming for Syrian refugees after the fall of long-time ruler Bashar al-Assad, the fable-like film, which is told from the perspective of children, “has many interesting parallels with what’s happening not only on Syria but also in Palestine,” says New York-based producer Mandy Ward. Ward is part of the “Sand Castle” production team alongside Houston King and Dubai-based Gianluca Chakra’s Front Row Filmed Entertainment and Mario Jr. Haddad’s Empire Entertainment.
“I think that this film was always told from a place of people who felt like they didn’t belong somewhere, and it was about the search for that,” Ward adds, noting that the tale of an Arabic family symbolically stuck on a seemingly idyllic island where they begin to uncover dark secrets stands for “what these [refugee] children are going through and the current stability of places like Syria.”
“Everybody is just looking for home, and this film really embodies the forgotten,” Ward explains.
There is an obvious connection between “The Sand Castle” and “Capernaum,” which Labaki directed and won the 2018 Cannes Jury Prize. Labaki had cast Zain Al Rafeea – then a 12-year-old living in the slums of Beirut with his family that had been forced to flee from the city of Daraa in southwestern Syria – as the young protagonist who sues his parents for giving him a life of neglect and poverty. She subsequently helped him and his family to resettle in Norway.
“Nadine initially came on board just help the film creatively,” Ward says. After reading the script, she introduced first-time director Brown to Zain and his family. Then, after Zain’s sister Reman was also cast in “Sand Castle,” Labaki also came on board to play the mother.
“So it was like the reuniting of family in so many ways,” Ward points out.
Watch the trailer for “The Sand Castle” below.