Dilbar

Red Brick Art Museum Collection

© Apichatpong Weerasethakul & Chai Siri

Intro

His name means ‘full of hearts’. He is a Bengali construction worker at the newly-built Sharjah Art Foundation Art Spaces. The city’s warm winter drives Dilbar into a slumber. His ‘sleeping’ existence shifts between the museum and the labour camp. This comatose journey slowly turns into a symphony of dreams and hallucinations. His senses are possessed by the unseen water in the desert. He becomes part of a bloodline that feeds the trees, the birds, the machines, and the buildings.

DILBAR is a portrait of a city builder, one of a million Bangladeshi workers currently living in the UAE. The film represents a physical and spiritual transmigration of a voiceless soul. The only sensible communications are the dialogues of nature and the daily noises. They are the lullabies for this hibernating character who epitomises the act of escaping, waiting, and ignoring. The film transports this ‘sleeper’ across the boundaries of economic and social status, of meaning, and of living and death.