There is a haunting study floating around somewhere on the Internet. The Community Training Centre for Crisis Management (CTCCM) has published this study that outlines the different symptoms of trauma the children in the Gaza Strip exhibit. Seventy-nine percent of the children there are plagued by constant nightmares, while almost all believe that death is fast approaching. The Sand Castle is a harrowing exploration of the ravaged minds of these children who live with constant terror and uncertain futures. Life is perpetually on the verge of getting snuffed out for a child living in the war zone, a life out of which childhood is painfully squeezed. However, when it is indeed squeezed out, we become witness to the way their minds run free and have the potential to project a greater terror than terror itself through the healing power of pure imagination.
Spoilers Ahead
How does the film start?
Young Jana must be ten years old when we meet her living an idyllic life on a desert island with her family. Jana lives inside the island’s lighthouse with her family—her mother, Yasmine; her father, Nabil; and her elder brother, Adam. Perhaps the family has been marooned here, but there is something that her parents do not want her to know. Yasmine waits for someone to rescue them, but no one arrives.
The parents’ pretense that everything is normal grates on Adam. They feast on the bare minimum rations left with them and take half sips of the little fresh water left with them. He wants to know if they will die like all the others. Jana does not understand why her brother behaves like this. Life inside the lighthouse, though cozy, is not at all sustainable for the family. In the morning, the family packs their bags and waits by the seashore for a rescue team to arrive. However, no one arrives, and no one leaves. The elders desperately try to establish a connection with the outer world through patchy radio signals, but fail miserably. While building a sand castle, Jana unearths a yellow plastic board, bearing some letters and a logo name, ‘Rabbit.’ Inside the lighthouse, Jana’s father fearfully clutches a family photograph and prays to God to have mercy on them. What stands out as a peculiar detail about the photograph is that it is that of a family of five, when they are only four.
While catching squid in the water, Nabil’s attention is caught by a body submerged under the water. The body is missing a red shoe. Nabil gets wounded in the process and loses a lot of blood. Later, Jana finds the missing shoe in the forest. She shows it to Yasmine, who tearfully buries it deep inside the forest. A storm is approaching towards the island—the four wait with bated breath for the storm to pass. While they are cooped inside, the structure of the lighthouse shakes. After the storm sweeps through, Adam goes out and finds fresh water.
What happens after Yasmine dies?
Yasmine notices a girl crying for help and hurries her way over to the middle of the sea to rescue her. She hugs her tight and begs the child to forgive her. However, the child who she tries to save is not Jana. The next thing we know, Yasmine is drowning. The kids bring her lifeless body to the lighthouse. After his wife’s death, Nabil takes to his bed. He tells a dejected Adam that he brought them here to the island to save them from their future but it seems there is no escape from the inevitable. We see the surreal image of Jana trying to crawl past innumerable dead bodies, enmeshed in each other, to reach a building on fire. Nabil dies soon after, and just before dying, he witnesses a ghostly apparition that resembles Yasmine.
Does the lighthouse exist in real life?
Through a steady stream of visual references, The Sand Castle slowly presents its commentary on the horrors of war, especially as imagined by children. When their parents’ deaths leave the two kids to fend for themselves with not a living soul around, Adam helps Jana recover from her trauma by inviting her to use her imaginative powers. The kids tuck themselves under a crochet blanket, with Adam holding his sister’s hand and assuring her that things will be alright if she imagines how she has left her sandcastle. The blanket flies away, and, from the dark room, they are instantly transported to the sunny visuals of the exterior environment.
The transforming images point to the ever-shifting world that oscillates between reality and imagination. To me, the scene reads like one where the kids have to bear the stress of losing both their parents to war. So, the elder brother tries to calm the child by asking her to self-soothe using her imagination. Jana imagines a sunny drawing of the lighthouse she had once drawn. The life in the lighthouse that we see is the life that Jana has imagined. Jana’s imagination has made daisies spring up in the most unforgiving land of the unknown island. Jana and Adam are seen running through the fields, flying kites, and savoring every bit of their childhood that was denied to them.
Their make-believe world in the lighthouse is disrupted when a sudden jolt brings them back to their reality. Adam and Jana are sitting inside their war-blighted home. With no living being in sight, it is a miracle that the kids are surviving in this colossal ruin. The kids cry for help from their window, but nobody rescues them. Adam takes it upon himself to grab the attention of the rescue team. We are thrown back into the world of the lighthouse. Adam goes out into the water, without proper precaution, and drowns. This is a euphemism— for a child to bear the loss of a sibling to war is too violent. Therefore, Adam’s death is endowed with a quality of heroism when Jana tries to make sense of his death.
Who is Yara?
Following Adam’s death, Jana is forced to traverse a deep, dark forest with tall grasses. The first name she yelps is that of Yara. After walking a distance, she witnesses her parents and her brother posing for a photoshoot. They ask Jana to join them with Yara. The way they all appear brings back to memory the photo that we found Nabil looking at. At that point, the presence of the other girl, other than Jana, did not make sense. Now we know that it was Yara, who must be Jana’s sister. In the misty forest of her imagination, Jana spots Yara looking at her from a distance. The Sand Castle then clears the mystery around Jana’s traumatic memory. While the sisters were at school, their school building was bombed, resulting in the death of countless children, including Yara. The image of a dead body with a missing red ballerina shoe is actually the resurfacing of the image of the body of Yara.
Does Jana survive in the end?
The seawater rises quickly and reaches the top of the lighthouse. Nothing survives, and all of the family’s belongings sink in the water. The conical roof of the lighthouse breaks out and unfurls into a lifeboat. The appearance of the lifeboat resembles the yellow object that Jana found earlier while making the sandcastle. The timely use of the lifeboat helps Jana to remain alive in the sea till help arrives. In The Sand Castle’s ending, when we find Jana out at sea, we realize that she has been pushed to undertake a dangerous migration attempt to escape the crumbling state of the country. Jana’s eventual discovery on the boat parallels the countless images in the media recording the Palestinians’ migration by sea. We see Adam on the rescue boat. It seems Jana imagines her brother’s return to try to rescue her from the sea. We do not know for how long she has been stuck on this boat. In order to survive, Jana imagines the world that we see hitherto in the film. The Sand Castle’s closing shot cycles back to how the film starts. It is Jana again, covered in what seems to be a blue tarpaulin sheet, reiterating the rhythmic chant of “Inhale” and “Exhale.” The image invites us to make an assumption regarding the nature of what we have been witness to. Was it real or just a figment of Jana’s imagination?
Jana, on the boat, covered with the blue sheet, mentally transports herself to the world of her drawing, just the way she was taught by her brother. The images of the logo on the yellow boat and the blue sheet do appear throughout the time Jana is seen with her family. Although they seemed out of place at that time, we now realize that they were symptomatic of Janas’s real life condition which was trying to surface above her imagined world.