My Name Is Salt review – a mesmerising, lyrical work

Seasonal work … My Name Is Salt

There is a growing subgenre of documentaries about food production, and the results are often riveting. Like the near-abstract fishing-themed film Leviathan, or farming-focused Our Daily Bread, My Name Is Salt unveils without commentary or judgment the effort required for one Indian family to harvest high-quality salt crystals from the mud of the Little Rann of Kutch in Gujarat. It’s an arduous, low-tech operation that involves digging ditches by hand, pumping ground water with noisy engines – which provide the film with a constant background beat – and crushing crust with giant stones at exactly the right moment. Director Farida Pacha and cinematographer Lutz Konermann transmute all this labour into a mesmerising, lyrical work about endurance, craftsmanship and family dynamics, all unfolding in a stunningly bleak landscape, where abandoned bicycles and machinery pepper the ground. Marcel Vaid’s score is aptly sparse, but seasons the images perfectly.