Sandstorm

Trail of the Spider transposes Western genre motifs and the suppressed racial history of the American west (where one in three cowboys were black or Mexican) onto the transforming landscape of East London. Questioning and re-imagining the Western’s portrayal of the “Vanishing Frontier” , the film extends the metaphor to the material and psychological conditions of a present day city increasingly dominated by volatile financial speculations and private interests.

Rabia, a ten-year-old Pakistani girl sets out to find why her only school in the village is closed. This fable is a ghost story with a tinge of magical-realism that explores corruption from a child's perspective.

In Pakistan, the public space is dominated by men. The confidence with which they walk the streets or weight train quickly disappears once they are confronted with female sexuality. Off-screen, several anonymous women talk about their sexuality. The images of the conventional partiarchal society are in sharp contrast to the liberating explicitness of the accounts of clit stimulation, sex with multiple partners, pissing, abortions, and rape.

The revelation of a top-secret British surveillance programme brings down the dominoes in a dark and analytical film about technology, rights and structural racism – and about a man with the courage to speak out.