User Reviews

"Taste of Cement" is a new Arabic-language movie from 2017 that has actually received a pretty great deal of awards recognition all over the globe in the last couple months. It is the second full feature film by director Ziad Kalthoum and definitely his most seen and most successful at this point. At 85 minutes, it is not a long film by any means, but sadly it does feel a lot longer than it actually. The film takes us to Beirut where we follow a few Syrian construction workers and witness their every day work at the conctruction site raising new buildings. while in the distance we find out and see how their homes are bombed. This paralllel is an interesting one that had me curious about the project, but eventually I must say that the material (or at least the way it was depicted here) simply did not impress me at all. This could have been, maybe should have been, one of these 30-minute HBO documentaries that get in at the Oscars frequently, but for almost 1.5 hours it is simply way too thin. There is hardly any narration, no interviews and it is all about what we see instead, like the workers sleeping at night during those few moments when we did not see them during their profession. On a lesser note, in terms of what we hear, it is about explosion sounds much more than about people actually talking about their inner states or why they do what they do. There is also no personal fate involved really. We find out nothing about the workers as individuals and instead they are portrayed as one grey mass, one group of people that exists, but there is nothing or nobody that stands really out from them. Aside from that, I felt that the mere construction site recordings were just way too much overall and that you could have cut at least half an hour of these, probably considerably more as really the war background and historic context was hardly there to make any difference as if you were watching workers on a construction site near your home wherever you come from. The longing/sadness aspect felt underwhelming too, and be it only because it was virtually impossible to make a connection with these men. They felt like fish in a pond, but not in a pond of sadness and desperation the way it should have been. The scene near the end with the saved child from the ruins is one that felt very much for the sake of it, maybe to include some tangible drama eventually and be concrete and precise for once in the face of all the vagueness that comes with this film. So yeah, I was mostly disappointed here I must say. The general idea in terms of absurdity and the Sisyphus work aspect in the sense of moving where war is over until they are needed elsewhere is interesting, but just cannot justify the entire project. I give this movie a thumbs-down. Not recommended.