
Documentary about refugees from Western Sahara living in Algeria.

Documentary about refugees from Western Sahara living in Algeria.
2018-02-18
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0.0This film offers a picture of the tense situation in which the Sahrawi people have lived for more than 30 years. The yearly celebration of a marathon in the Sahrawi refugee camps serves as the central focus of the story.
6.5The political upheaval in North Africa is responsibility of the Western powers —especially of the United States and France— due to the exercise of a foreign policy based on practical and economic interests instead of ethical and theoretical principles, essential for their international politic strategies, which have generated a great instability that causes chaos and violence, as occurs in Western Sahara, the last African colony according to the UN, a region on the brink of war.
0.0Spanish actor Pepe Viyuela embarks on a personal journey on the trail of his grandfather Gervasio, a soldier in the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War.
The film takes place in the Sahrawi refugee camps installed since 1975 near Tindouf, southwest Algeria. It takes us on a filmed investigation led by two anthropologists and their Sahrawi guide with families of martyrs and seriously wounded from the Sahara War (1975-1991). Throughout the encounters, the narrative evokes the story of a rehabilitation center for war-wounded people known to all under the enigmatic name of Al-Madrasa, "the school".
0.0Waiting for the UN is a poetic documentary about life in the desert, literally and figuratively. We follow the everyday life of a Saharawi family from occupied Western Sahara, who have lived ”temporary” in a refugee camp in Algeria for over 40 years. Waiting for God and the UN, as the father puts it.
5.7Straddling a 2,400-kilometer-long wall constructed by the Moroccan army, the Western Sahara is today divided into two sections — one occupied by Morocco, the other under the control of the Sahrawi National Liberation Movement’s Polisario Front. Drawing from stories of flight, exile, interminable waiting and the arrested, persecuted lives on both sides of that wall, this film bears witness to the Sahrawi people, their land, their entrapment in other people’s dreams. In an esthetic that sublimates the real, Lost Land resonates like a score that juxtaposes sonorous landscapes, black-and-white portraits and nomadic poetics.
Documentary about the arduous early years of the Sahrawi cause (1977)
0.0Dadah, a Sahrawi boy living in the Dakhla refugee camp, knows nothing beyond life in the desert, the sand-filled air, the ever-present dunes on the horizon, school, games, the sullen world of the conversations that adults have while they make tea… Through film, he will discover very different worlds.
0.0Through images and testimonies of Sahrawi women, this film introduces us to the situation and the living conditions the Sahrawi people have been subjected to since, in 1975, Western Sahara was occupied by Morocco and thousands of men, women and children were forced to flee and look for refuge in Algerian territory, in the inhumane "hamada" (rocky desert) of Tindouf. Sahrawi women, exiled to the refugee camps of Tindouf since 1975, have been the driving force behind a genuine revolution in all areas of Sahara society. They have carried out the miracle of reviving the spirit of a devastated community in the middle of a hostile, rocky desert.
0.0Ali Salem Hamudi Mohamed - Yahdih, was born in 1955 in El Aaiún (Western Sahara). He completed his secondary schooling in the "Spanish" Sahara. A scholarship allowed him to enrol at the Universidad de la Peninsula in 1975, but Morocco's invasion of the Sahara led him to return to the city of his birth and go into exile with his people, participating in the resistance and helping to organise the Tindouf Refugee Camps (Algeria). In 1980, the Polisario Front and the Government of Cuba offered him the opportunity to study Architecture at the University of Havana. On his return to the Camps in 1985 he worked for the SADR's Department of Construction. He designed more than twenty public buildings, including town halls, schools and nursery schools, and also collaborated with international aid organisations to build hospitals and training colleges. All of these buildings were built collectively by the Saharan people. ;In 1999 he emigrated to Spain. His family joined him five years later.
OASIS, a documentary that tells us about water's historical role in Western Sahara via the true stories of people who turned this wild desert into a place full of life.
0.0The Nomad Garden is an ode to the impossible. A young Sahrawi refugee shows how he grows organic vegetables and herbs in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, overcoming challenges like the lack of water, extreme temperatures and a barren soil.
0.0Silence always surrounds the mine, first when it explodes and then when it eternally haunts its victims. The history of the silence of this fire hidden by Morocco in the sand of Western Sahara has left more than 4,000 victims in what is considered the largest minefield in the world. Daha and Fatimetu suffered the effect of the silence of the mines, their lives changed forever, like that of the Saharawi people who, after 14 years cleaning the desert of artifacts, the rupture of the ceasefire have left the future of the contamination of their territory.
0.0Benda, a young Sahrawi woman in the diaspora wonders about the future of her people's children and women. We accompany her on an emotional journey to the refugee camps to see the more human face of the conflict. The film leaves the political as a mere context to focus on the dreams and drama of a people determined in their struggle to return home.
0.0A boy has a dream of traveling to the world, especially to Paris where his uncle lives, but a wall built on his land divides his country and does not allow him to travel or cross to the other side of his land.
Taleb, who came to a refugee camp at the age of five in 1975 and returned there after his studies abroad, tells of his life as a displaced person, his gratitude for the reception and support in Algeria, and his hope that the Sahrawis may one day return to their homeland. For Taleb, this hope drives him to actively prepare for better times: as a graduate in agricultural sciences, he conceived a successful small-scale closed-loop economy in a desert under the most difficult conditions, producing enough food for self-sufficiency.
0.0This documentary tells the story of Tateh Lehbib, a Saharawi refugee who after studying Renewable Energy at the University of Algiers and then a master's degree in energy efficiency at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, has designed a type of shelter made with plastic bottles filled with sand. This innovative circular shelter aims to improve the harsh living conditions experienced in the desert in Tindouf, reducing internal temperature and offering a better resistance to sandstorm, while having an eco-friendly purpose by reusing plastic bottles.
0.0Lalia is a Saharaui girl who lives in a refugee camp in Algiers. She has only heard her grandmother and grandfather talk about her country, about the Sahara, that was taken away by Morroco. She dreams of one day seeing the ocean, seeing her real country. The reality she lives in is different... the uncertainty of the refugee camps, the political unbalance... but she is strong... and she knows that there can be change... she won't stop dreaming, and she won't stop longing..
0.0The Runner is a film about endurance. It is the story of a champion long-distance runner whose journey transformed him from an athlete into the symbol of a national liberation movement. Salah Hmatou Ameidan is willing to risk his life, his career, his family and his nationality to run for a country that doesn't exist. He is from Western Sahara, officially Africa's last colony and under Moroccan occupation since 1975.
6.0Filled with vitality, humor and unexpected situations, Hamada paints an unusual portrait of a group of young friends living in a refugee camp in the middle of nowhere. Western Sahara is known as “the last colony in Africa” and this conflict is the longest and one of the least known ongoing disputes in the continent, but the Sahrawi people refuse to become invisible.