(2013, Switzerland/India)

Year after year, for an endless eight months, thousands of families move to a desert in India to extract salt from the burning earth. Every monsoon their salt fields are washed away, as the desert turns into sea. And still they return, striving to produce the whitest salt in the world.

The desert extends endlessly – flat, grey, relentless. There is not a tree or blade of grass or rock. But there is one thing in abundance: salt. Salt is everywhere, lying just beneath the cracked, baked surface of the earth. This is the Little Rann of Kutch, 5000 sq kms of saline desert. And for eight months of the year, the salt people live here – laboriously extracting salt from this desolate landscape. They have been doing this for generations.

Year after year, they migrate from their villages, 40,000 of them, to live on this bleak land without water, electricity or provisions. Arriving just after the monsoon, Sanabhai and his family will live here from September until April. Their nearest neighbour is a kilometre away. They communicate by flashing mirrors in the sunlight. Sanabhai’s wife Devuben walks across the bare, trackless desert to chop firewood. They buy the family’s water supply from a private tanker that comes once a week.

Sanabhai has taken a large loan from the salt merchant in town as an advance on his salt harvest. He needs money to dig a well to reach the saline water 70 feet below ground, and to buy the diesel for the pump which draws the brine into the salt pans. Over the next few months, the only sound to break the silence of the desert is the mechanical drone of the pump’s engine. It takes eight months for the brine to crystallise into salt. Knee-deep in the brine pond, under the blinding glare of the sun, Sanabhai and his family trample the ground to prevent the salt from congealing. Once the brine has evaporated enough to allow the salt to be handled, they gather it with heavy wooden rakes until large crystals have formed. Their labor is rhythmic, a dance that mirrors the dance of the mirages on the burning horizon. The white crystals are as sharp as glass. Only two of them have rubber boots. Several times in a day Sanabhai inspects the quality of the salt crystals and keeps a close watch on the level of water in the salt pans.

Two of Sanabhai’s children – a boy and a girl aged eleven and eight– go to a school recently opened by an NGO. Everyday at 11, after their morning’s work at the salt pans, they cycle off to school – just another hut in the vast emptiness of the desert, but with one difference: the children have planted paper flowers around it.

In April, the salt merchant sends his man to inspect the salt. No good, he says: the crystals are small, not white enough. He cuts the price agreed with Sanabhai at the beginning of the season. Sanabhai is downcast, but he shrugs his shoulders: what can you do? The next salt season will certainly be better.

Meanwhile, somewhere at the edge of the desert, mountains of salt lie next to the railway tracks waiting for transport to the city. The season is over and the monsoon is on its way: the heavy rains will soon wash the family’s salt fields away. The desert itself will not remain a desert anymore, but will turn into a sea. And the only way one can cross it is by boat.

trailer

official website

director’s notes

Crew

Written and directed by  Farida Pacha

Cinematography  Lutz Konermann

Editing  Katharina Fiedler

Sound  Sanjeev Gupta, Ramesh Birajdar

Sound editing and mix  Florian Eidenbenz

Music  Marcel Vaid

Producers  Lutz Konermann, Farida Pacha

for  Leafbird Films GmbH (CH)

Developed at the Binger Doc Lab

Supported by the IDFA Bertha Fund

and the Bundesamt für Kultur BAK

Format

92 min., HD, Gujarati (with subtitles)

***

The film has been generously supported by

BTS Investment Advisors Ltd.

Sata Foundation

Goethe Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai

René Da Rold

and crowd-funded through wemakeit.ch with the precious contribution of

Andreas Beutler
Wolfgang Blösche
Carsten Bockermann
Bernhard Bösch
Toine Boymans
Brigitte Boymans-Mommerz
Walter Brand
Anja Brüll
Christa Capaul
Fiorella Castanotto
Priyamvadha Chandrasekhar
Sumit Das
Joost de Jong
Simonka de Jong
Umberto Dindo
Amina Djahnine
Marjon Donkers
Jarow Dworjanin
Rea Eggli
Tom Fama
Mazin Fatehi
Farida Fatehi
Mohamedi Fatehi
Barbara Flückiger
Johannes Fopp
Jennifer Fox
Sandro Friedrich
Claudia Gamperle
Christy Garland
Zita Gillis
Markus Glauser
Nina Grunder
Juerg Grunder
André Gstettenhofer
Radiya and Sourendu Gupta
Diego Gutierrez Coppe
Susanne Hakuba
Jennifer Hardacker
Frank Horn
Hans-Jörg Hummel
Peter Jakoubek
Abde Kapadia
Kirsten Kelbel-Konermann
Mark Kessell
Hermann Kirchmann
Annette Köster
Ivo Kummer
Matthias Kunz
Mario Labriola
Regina Labriola
Daniel Leuthold
Judith Lichtneckert
Piyush Mittal
Lubbaina Mittal
Joan Morselt
Maria Mueller
Kamal Musale
Liliane Ott
Al-Azhar Pacha
Payal Parekh
Luk Perceval
Peter Riede
Ueli Riegg
Vittorio Rizzo
Barbara Rüegger Kunz
Ariel Ruiz i Altaba
Sunayana Sadarangani
Talzeem Sansare
Radhika Saxena
Luc Schaedler
Anka Schmid
Roland Schmid
Nicole Schroeder
Werner Schweizer
Indrani Sen
Anil Shah
Zarina Sitabkhan
Heike Spickermann
Theo Stich
Andrea Superti-Furga
Jacqueline Surchat
Barbara Swarthout
Gabriella Träger
Susanne Trefzer
Martin Umbach
Nancy Weiss
Anita Welty
Franz Josef Welty
Barbara Winkelmann
Gertraut Wolf
Gamila Ylstra