Venice Film Festival 2026: Our Share of Sand (dir. Shalini Adnani) | Review
Witness a meditative thriller on reverse culture shock and the disillusionment of real-world inequality, all through Shalini Adnani’s revolutionary direction in Our Share of Sand.
Maya sits in the car, staring at the police station, too wound up to get out. She doesn’t know what she’s feeling — or she does, but she can’t say it. So, she locks the door and stays put. Her mother watches from outside, waiting, unable to believe that Maya won’t just get out of the car. She tries: “Open the door, Maya.” But Maya won’t even look at her. She’s focused on the police station in the side mirror, frozen, silent, unresponsive. Something is clearly wrong. Her mother gives up waiting, opens the driver’s door, and gets in. She looks at Maya, who finally speaks: “I can’t do it. I’ve got nothing to say.” The reluctance is written all over her. Her mother knows why. Maya knows why. And the film makes it clear — eventually, everyone will.
Shalini Adnani’s White Ant (15 min, 2023) left me breathless. Certain scenes still surface in my mind — images of loss so deep, of impermanence so vast, they remind me how little we hold onto, and how much we cannot hold at all. In Our Share of Sand, premiering at the 2026 Venice International Film Festival, within the Critics’ Week competition, Maya and her mother Priti make a journey to India to visit her estranged father. Maya engages with her surroundings with a studied curiosity, treating the experience as both an educational endeavor and a holiday. It may be characterized as a dual-purpose adventure: an opportunity to deepen her relationship with her father and to explore the village that represents the origin of her cultural heritage. One night, Maya goes with her father and his crew to witness a sand mining session. Then an accident happens — one of the workers gets hurt. Maya sees something shift. It’s not as simple as a search for gems. The ocean has layers, and so does this story. There are agendas buried down there, secrets that are going to surface slowly for Maya and everyone else.
I begin with the technical team — a constellation of talents that has lifted this film beyond itself. Sound (Leandros Ntounis), color (Manthos Sardis), light (Adric Watson) — they open like a rare Pandora’s box. This gathering of legends weaves an invisible thread to the viewer, drawing us into investigation, into attention, into every frame the film dares to show. And these three technical elements have made this observatory possible. We’ve got Ellora Torchia from House of the Dragon and Mohammad Zeeshan Ayuub playing Maya’s parents, and honestly, they slip into these roles like they’ve always been there. Maya (Maya Mehta) holds her own alongside them — it’s a tight, well-cast family. Big shoutout to casting directors Lucy Pardee & Tess Joseph for making it click.
The film’s strength isn’t just in the tech — it’s in how it’s all put together. The real lens here is a child’s fragile perspective, looking at injustice and corruption with wide-open eyes. It’s not just curiosity; it’s a quiet determination to see what’s really there. The director captures discomfort in intimate frames: zoomed-in faces, flickering expressions, quiet revelations. And the most intense part? Watching a child’s wrongdoing through the eyes of another child. The director explores a familiar but potent exchange: obedience and learning, especially learning to see disbelief and dishonesty in the people who raised you. It’s reminiscent of Lidia in The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, where the child’s view amplifies the tension of misalignment. The film pushes harder: how reliable are our families? Is trust a trap? And does love make us blind to the truth?
Our Share of Sand is more than a meditative thriller — it is a film that mines gold from darkness. With precision and technical brilliance, it gleams across the festival circuit. It drops us into the wreckage of unlawful acts, into events that vanish without a trace, into consequences waiting behind the curtain — where secrets breathe and revenge uncoils. The film holds up a mirror to power, showing how status and its abuse become shields for survival. And then it turns, quietly, to show us that maturity does not belong to age alone. Boldness can bloom in a girl whose eyes take in the world in a single breath — and change everything.
The film reaches further into human rights, into history, into the weight of inheritance — all the forces that shape a soul. Perhaps Shalini Adnani is the UK’s own Jane Campion, channeling The Power of the Dog through a strange, twisting thriller. And the one who sees the sparkle, the right eyes — will find the key.
The 83rd edition of the Venice International Film Festival is running on September 2-12, 2026.
