A villager maimed by a mining blast and his wife’s fight for compensation open up a story of exploitation, complicity and indigenous belief in “Veil of Dust,” the new project from “Rapture” director Dominic Sangma.
The project is part of the Asian Project Market, which runs within the Busan International Film Festival’s Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM).
When an explosion rips through the hills, 35-year-old Nengsal is dug out of the debris having lost a leg. His wife Ajin, 32, sets out to win compensation but runs into a system that thrives on exploiting people and keeping them quiet. The headman is compromised, an NGO in the area is pursuing its own politics, and the man running the mine discloses that Nengsal was never on the books, leaving workers like him invisible on their own land. Through the couple’s children, 12-year-old Kasanchi and 10-year-old Miklu, the film moves into a mystical realm rooted in indigenous belief, as healer Rengin leads Miklu through an unsettling ritual on a bird meant to “transfer” his father’s wound. When an unplanned blast kills a boy from the village, the elders take advance compensation to keep the peace. With Nengsal pleading with Ajin to end his pain and her fight for justice going nowhere, she turns to the rare herbs in her garden, which can both heal and harm.
Stone mining has surfaced in Sangma’s earlier films, but here it takes center stage, and the urgency of the subject led him to pause the final film of his village trilogy. The blasts, the shaking ground, wrecked homes and farms, and villagers killed in mine accidents are part of his childhood memories, and the mining is still going on. It had been normal for so long that he never felt the need to address it, he says, until a recent stay in the village, where he saw landslides, cracked houses and mining edging closer to the main settlement.
“To an outsider, unregulated mining might seem like a mere environmental issue. But to those of us who live in its shadow, it doesn’t just erode the soil – it erodes the soul,” Sangma says.
The father of a young daughter, Sangma says he hopes speaking out will make the village a slightly better home for her. The elders have stayed quiet, perhaps because they never saw mining as a problem or because it has fed many of them, and the deeper he went, the more tangled it became. “In a way villagers were the part of the reason why it continues for so long,” he says.
Sangma calls the film “a microcosm to what we are doing to the mother earth with our greed” and hopes it will nudge audiences to care a little more for the planet.
Producer Xu Jianshang, who produced Sangma’s debut “Ma’ama” and “Rapture,” says the director is moved by his community’s suffering and that his very local concerns speak to the wider world. “There is beauty and grace in his image making and as a producer I feel we need to support more such voices,” she says.
“Rapture,” the second film in Sangma’s trilogy, premiered at Locarno in 2023 and won the cultural diversity award at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. “Ma’ama” won best cinematography at the Shanghai International Film Festival and best film at the Jogja-Netpac Asian Film Festival.
“Veil of Dust” is in development, and in Busan the team is raising money and seeking co-production partners and backers who share the director’s vision.