‘Our Share of Sand’ Review: A Brooding Indian Social Drama Told Through the Eyes of a Young Girl
Shalini Adnani's debut feature "Our Share of Sand" is a class drama set against India's sand-mining industry, seen through the eyes of Maya, a 12-year-old British Asian girl who returns to India to join her industrialist father Rohan. When Maya witnesses a workplace accident caused by her father's corner-cutting practices, which leaves a local boy her age permanently injured, she is confronted with questions of privilege, complicity and whether to speak out, forcing her to reckon with the moral compromises underpinning her family's wealth.
The film, reviewed by Variety, stars Maya Mehta as Maya, Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub as her father Rohan, Ellora Torchia as her mother Priti, and Krish Raj More as Kiran, the injured worker's son who befriends Maya despite a language barrier. Adnani, a Chilean-born Londoner of Indian descent, draws on her own childhood visits to India to shape the story's outsider perspective, using a framing device involving a family diamond and a disputed origin story to probe themes of caste, inherited privilege and the diaspora's complicity in structural inequality, with the film's Mumbai-outskirts setting standing as a broader symbol of a nation built on entrenched discrimination.
In short
- Debut film "Our Share of Sand" explores class and caste through a child's eyes
- British Asian girl witnesses accident caused by her father's factory
- Director draws on her own outsider experience visiting India as a child
Explained simply
India’s construction industry depends heavily on sand, which is dug from riverbeds and other sites. Mining can provide work and materials, but unsafe conditions and weak oversight can put workers at risk.
Maya is a British Asian child visiting her father, Rohan, an Indian industrialist whose business is linked to sand mining. She befriends Kiran, the son of a local worker, and their families’ different circumstances bring questions of class, caste and inherited privilege into view.
The story also touches on the Indian diaspora: people with family ties to India who live elsewhere. Maya’s position between Britain and India shapes what she sees, while the family’s wealth connects personal choices to wider inequalities.