For more than thirty years, tens of thousands of Saharawi have lived in makeshift camps, refugees in the Algerian desert. Because of this situation, children are forced to travel far to complete their studies. Many are trained in Cuba during a period of more than twelve years away from home. This documentary chronicles the daily lives of these students, both in the desert, as in Cuba, in a round trip full of contrasts.
For more than thirty years, tens of thousands of Saharawi have lived in makeshift camps, refugees in the Algerian desert. Because of this situation, children are forced to travel far to complete their studies. Many are trained in Cuba during a period of more than twelve years away from home. This documentary chronicles the daily lives of these students, both in the desert, as in Cuba, in a round trip full of contrasts.
2011-01-01
0
Oceans of exile
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.
0.0Lalia 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..
0.0In a refugee camp in the Sahara desert lives a deaf boy who wants to learn to write. Welcome to the silent world of Kori and his best friend the camel Caramelo.
0.0"Imagine sleeping at home" follows the story of several children who guide us to understand the conflict and the problems that they face, but also pay attention of small groups of friends who spontaneously comes to camera to tell what are their concerns. In the documentary we can also find the testimony of the director of a school for disabled children, the story of how a mother had to escape from the occupied territories when the Moroccan police detained for a week her ten years old son, or the analysis of a Sahrawi soldier about the situation of their children.
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.
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.
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.
0.0After 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.
0.0The film, shot in the Saharawi refugee population camps, tells the story of a group of students from a film school who, for their final year project, decide to shoot on the Wall of Shame erected and mined by Morocco, in the middle of the current war that is being waged after the breaking of the ceasefire by the Alawite regime in November 2020.
7.0Forty years after its people were promised freedom by departing Spanish rulers, Western Sahara remains Africa's last colony. This film chronicles the everyday violence experienced by Sahrawis living under Moroccan occupation and voices the aspirations of a desert people for whom the era of colonialist never ended.
0.0It happens in Ecuador and South Korea, in Italy, in Venezuela and also in Western Sahara. Three men and two women live every day acting against the global corporate order. Their actions are the voices of others, of individuals, of crowds, of many. Those who seek another world.
0.0This is the reality of women of the same nation who live divided by the wall that has separated them for 35 years now. Exiled Sahrawi women who live in the refugee camps in Tindouf (Algeria) have a 88% representation rate in teaching and in healthcare, and 9% in government, evidence that they are the fundamental pillar of society. The ones who remained in the occupied territories of Western Sahara are part of every aspect of the struggle and activism against Moroccan occupation. They protest at the intifadas, they research the plunder of their natural resources, they paint flags, write pamphlets and they belong to the organisations that defend Sahrawi human rights in Western Sahara. These women: former prisoners, formerly missing, activists, today are tortured, harassed, followed, surveilled and violated simply for defending their legitimate right to freely express themselves in favour of Western Sahara’s independence.
0.0Bubisher, as well as being 'the bird of luck', is a word loaded with literary meaning in Spanish in the Sahrawi refugee camps of Tindouf. Seeing the way in which two cultures interact through small stories and tales can is striking and so is the contrast between the resilience of the young female generations and the realities of life in the desert. This documentary paints a picture of a generation of young female Sahrawis.
0.0Brahim Mohamed Fadel is a young Sahrawi boy, blind since birth, who studies at the University of Málaga. A life full of difficulties, overcome thanks to his extraordinary spirit of overcoming. A film for reflecting, learning and feeling.
0.0Is already 40 years since the saharawi population became refugee in Algeria because of the Moroccan occupation. While the POLISARIO government tries out to solve the conflict with institutional help, saharawi youngsters advocate for the option of an armed conflict. While they wait, cinema will be their only weapon.
0.0The rocks, sculpted by sea and wind, stand resilient, displaying the scars of the fragments torn away. From that beach, a young Sahrawi embarks on a mental journey to his last visit to the camps. The places, the rituals, the history, and the time make his voice merge with the memories of his mother's stories, showing a deep contrast between the situation in the recent past and the present.
0.0In April 2007, during the celebration of FiSahara, three friends embarked on the adventure of teaching a photography course in the Dajla refugee camp in Algeria.
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.
0.0From the Sahrawi refugee camps of Tindouf (Algeria) to Tifariti (freed territories of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic), we embark hand in hand on an adventure with a group of artists from all around the World. Each one has their own story, experience, worldview and artistry. An extraordinary and heartwarming journey through a dreamlike world that gives us hope in humanity.
Ismael, Hindu and Bachir are three Sahrawis living in Gran Canaria (Canary Islands). They tell us about their lives away from their home country (Western Sahara), their own personal history and experiences... and the challenges they face in an island they consider something of a second home. This short film combines the three main characters' impressions with archive images of the Dignity Camp, of the Tindouf camps, and images of the Western Sahara in the mid- 70's. A Canary Islands production shooted in Gáldar and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.