Writer: Ban Maraqa
Director: Asmahan Bkerat
Asmahan Bkerat’s Concrete Land explores urban encroachment on pastoral lands in Bedouin settlements in Jordan and its impact on the culture and lifestyle of the existing residents, the farmers and families whose connection to that land goes back centuries. As a digger tears up 100-year-old trees to make space for new apartments, space that has been deemed not suitable for farming is repurposed. Bkerat lingers on that destruction as trees are ripped from the ground and taken away in trucks, all the while overlooked by the bemused Al-Najar family who are at the forefront of this form of ‘progress’ taking something from their rural life as they try to pass down traditional skills to their children and grandchildren.
“Art is a waste of time, let’s do maths instead,” a grandfather insists as he tries to teach a group of youngsters how to subtract using their fingers. It feels like a universal moment, repeated the world over. Many of these stories do as Bkerat shows people talking about their families, tending kindly to their animals, doing DIY around their homes and discussing their memories of war. Here life goes on like any other as Concrete Land focuses on three generations with children dreaming of having their own bedrooms while adults explain the repercussions of marrying outside of their communities in a kaleidoscope of family life.
Bkerat makes much of the dust and contamination, the noise and mechanical intrusion of the building works, cutting frequently back to the peaceful life of the Bedouins whose proximity to nature fills the screen with lush green landscapes. It’s a stark difference and you feel the implicit judgement in the erosion of this simpler way of life, although the need to interact with urban services from maternity units and vets to rehousing as well as the television sets that the children watch at night present a complexity to the off-grid approach which can never be entirely free from engagement with the State.
Through the film the central family debate how much they should engage with that progress with clear generational differences between older members wanting to retain the freedom of their traditional life, wanting to stay in their tents while the younger adults are more open to housing but want the family to stay together. The division this causes between them gives some drive to the film but the documentary maker is less keen to advocate for one side or the other but clearly has a fondness for life as it is.
It takes some time for the film to get to these debates, around an hour of set-up before the dilemma of whether to stay or go and the political impact of the group within the local area so its running time is certainly a sedate 100-minutes without looking too deeply at the question of land ownership and the commercial practices employed to remove its occupants. But Concrete Land is certainly an emotive examination of displacement and the meaning of home.
Concrete Land is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 7-18 October.
