The relevant NGOs and the Spanish film industry have organized the First International Sahara Film Festival, with the official objective of bringing films to refugee camps for the first time for a few days. With a humorous tone and a self-critical intention, the aim is to include a range of shades of gray in a world dominated by black, white, and slogans.
The relevant NGOs and the Spanish film industry have organized the First International Sahara Film Festival, with the official objective of bringing films to refugee camps for the first time for a few days. With a humorous tone and a self-critical intention, the aim is to include a range of shades of gray in a world dominated by black, white, and slogans.
2005-01-01
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0.0The Sahrawi people have lived in exile for almost half a century in the driest desert of the African continent. There, where basic resources such as water are scarce, there is a film school. As the world looks the other way, a group of young filmmakers carries out a battle against oblivion.
0.0This is the true story of Fetim Salam, a Saharawi refugee falsely portrayed as a slave in the Australian documentary 'Stolen'. Australian filmmakers, Violeta Ayala and Daniel Fallshaw, travel to the Saharawi refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria in 2007 and claim to discover 20,000 slaves in the camps run by the independence movement Polisario Front. Refugees are outraged for being portrayed as slaves, and humanitarian aid workers are incredulous about these allegations as they know the camps intimately. Filmmaker Carlos Gonzalez retraces their steps in search of the truth and finds a web of lies, misinformation and Moroccan operatives reshaping the truth.
10.0My Sahrawi family' is a report - documentary that reflects the bonds of unity between Sahrawi families and Spanish families who every summer welcome minors from refugee camps into their homes.
Documentary about the arduous early years of the Sahrawi cause (1977)
0.0The Sahrawi women relate their exil, the tortures, their memories and the difficulties of life as refugees. They are beautiful, touching... Educated by the Polisario Front and attached to the values of islam, they are widows, divorcede or married to fighting men. Owing to the force of circumstances, they have built a society of independant muslim women...
0.0Two planes take off at the same time headed in opposite directions. Fatimetu and Ejehla. Two distinct lives destined to follow similar paths. One past desired, but fuzzy, and a future. One inheritance, becoming more and more fragile. “Heirs” gathers the testimony of different generations of women who live within and outside of the camps and paints a profile of the present situation in which these Sahrawi women live and the future they've inherited, living in an orphan-like territory separated from their homeland for more than 33 years…
Documentary about Aminatou Haidar and her fight for the Sahrawi rights
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.
Every year, approximately 800 Sahrawi boys and girls leave the refugee camps to study in Cuba, Algeria and Libya… 15 years later, they return biologists, doctors, engineers… but when they get back to the refugee camps all they have is the desert…
10.0Milestone No. 3 is a documentary following three lifelong friends as they travel across the country to California for the very first time. Armed with doubts and anxiety about continuing his filmmaking career, director Nicholas Dapolito enlists the help of friends and family to examine why he creates, and if this path is truly right for him.
0.0One hundred years of the cinematic memory of a small country told through motion graphics. A brief tour of previously unseen images and forgotten fragments of Costa Rican cinema, which, amid state efforts and industrial ambitions, prevailed throughout the 20th century.
0.0After the military occupation of Western Sahara in 1976, Moroccan government attacked the civil population with hard repression, forcing hundreds of Saharan people to “disappear” in clandestine jails. An invisible and slow death was the only horizon. However, some prisoners were able to survive after suffering their own “extinction” for more tan 10 years, ripped from their families, suffering torture, in total isolation. When they finally were released, their known world had changed radically.
2.0Young Mohamed Dih, who in Seville, returns to his birthplace – a refugee camp in Western Sahara. Time flows differently here: the times of the day are marked by calls to prayer and the seasons – by the rainfall. When a torrential downpour destroys his family’s home, the protagonist stays in the camp for longer to help to rebuild it.
0.0Humaná tells two stories, the daily life of a Sahrawi refugee and food they receive to live and hard process of distributing hundreds of tons of food daily. From the voice of Najla and Jesus primarily, we´ll see the difficulties and as the project AECID and Attsf proposed in 2005, was a turning point for all food arrived on time for every Sahrawi.
10.0Smara is the city of dust, kingdom of sirocco, a surviving ruin of a suffocating region… Thousands of Sahrawis who fled Western Sahara after the war against Morocco (36 years ago) live in this refugee camp, located in the Sahara’s inhospitable north, in the middle of the Algerian hamada. They live here, under poor human conditions, thanks to international help. A small film cooperative fights, with barely any means, to elevate the voices of young Saharawis. It is one of the many Nollywoods (Hollywood of emptiness) found in Africa.
0.0Salka was born as a refugee in the Sahara desert, and grew up in Italy by chance: she was one of the so-called "Little Peace Ambassadors". Sahrawis have been sending to Europe their children for decades, to show the world the injustice they suffer. A 2700 km long mined wall across the desert, and there's no mention of it even in UN resolutions on Western Sahara. This former spanish colony, just in front of Canary Islands, is occupied by Morocco since 1975. In 2011 I spent 5 weeks in the Sahrawi refugee camps near Tindouf, outer south-west of Algeria. This is where the Sahrawi's escape from their war-devastated land stopped, though none of them imagined they would stay there so long. When I met Salka, her foster italian mother Carmen and her mother Aisha, I had finally found what I had been looking for: state of rest began to take shape. Neither Salka nor I were born when it all began. Western Sahara has been occupied by Morocco and plundered by many others for over 40 years
0.0Documentary that explains the current climate of political turmoil in the north of Africa caused by the embedded problem of the decolonization of Western Sahara. A region on the brink of war. The responsibility of Western governments and social media, especially France and Spain, whose foreign policy based on economic interests puts on the background moral principles. In the case of Spain also its responsibilities as administrator of the territory which has triggered a situation of chaos and violence. The film describes the current situation of Western Sahara in its three conflict zones, presents its protagonists and denounces the informative silence condemning the Saharawi people to the oblivion.
0.0Testimonies of a people enlisted on the path of independence. Records taken at refugee camps in Tindouf (Sahara Desert in southern Algeria) and Bir Lehlu (region liberated by the Polisario Front)
0.0Atu is a 12-year-old Saharawi girl who comes to Valencia every summer to escape the suffocating desert summer in exile. Two opposing worlds between a conflict that has driven hundreds of thousands of people away from Western Sahara forcing them to live in southwestern Algeria. At her young age, with little resources and no homeland, she courageously faces the future.
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.