people get sucked into sand in the desert

After an all-night graduation beach party, a group of hung-over students wakes up under the blazing sun to find their numbers somewhat depleted. An enormous alien creature has burrowed down deep and anyone foolish enough to make contact with the sand finds themselves at the mercy of a sea of flesh-eating tentacles. Will they ever be able to escape its carnivorous clutches?

In a vast expanse of desert sands two men exchange health tips: “Wild boar meat is good for your lungs,” says one. “Wild boars and groundhogs,” replies the other. They press bunches of straw into the sand to combat the desertification and sandstorms here in the Tengger Desert of northwest China. A little later we see other people, men and women, doing the same work. In this immense swathe of sand—the Tengger is about the size of the Netherlands— their labor looks like a Sisyphean task. Perhaps it is due to the resulting sense of pointlessness that the conversations start to take on a more serious tone. One of the two men tells of how his wife left him, and how he had to raise his child alone. He once envisioned a different kind of life, but things go as they go. “Our fate is like an unbreakable wall,” he observes, with a resigned tone.

Seen right through the sandstorms that rack the lives of a tribe living on a desert oasis, is a subtle and not-so-subtle mistreatment of the female members of the tribe - tribal chiefs have the right to be the first to deflower virgins, and single or widowed mothers must walk a narrow line of behavior restrictions that do not apply to their male counterparts. Both genders, however, fight the brunt of the harsh desert winds together.

A man digs a hole in the dunes.

The film tells the story of a near future in which the earth is irreversibly sandy, as human emissions and rubbish exceed its carrying capacity. As plants and animals mutate to create the Earth's new masters, the "sand worms", which are slaughtering the planet and driving humans to the brink of extinction, the survivors are left to their own devices to find the only remaining refuge in the deep desert, the "Oasis". An exiled team of wealthy businessmen, scientists, security chiefs, mechanic families and gangsters set out on an adventure to find the Oasis in a special armoured vehicle, but the bloodthirsty insects are hot on their heels.

Modern-day ramblers tumble through the desert and into trouble.

A vacationing entomologist suffers extreme physical and psychological trauma after being taken captive by the residents of a poor seaside village and made to live with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them.

Summer 2002 - Paris Plage. Like a moving desert that causes mirages or like the legend that says love can be found where the sky touches the sand, by some simple coincidence a miracle occurs: the sand brings Elisa, a strange, fresh, mysterious beauty.