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
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.
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.
0.0Tebraa is the song of the women of the Sahara desert. Songs of love or lamentation that they sing when they are alone. This collective documentary made by a group of Andalusian women tells the life and injustices that Sahrawi women experience in the adverse conditions of exile and in the occupied territories of Western Sahara.
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.
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.
0.0The 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.
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.
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…
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.
8.0"Legna: speak the Saharawi verse" is an audiovisual poetry story that traces the essential elements of the Saharawi culture, chaining the verses recited in a rigorous and evocative way in Hasania and Spanish by the poets and poetesses themselves. Poems that sing and evoke the essence of Bedouin material culture linked to the movement from Saquia el Hamra to Rio de Oro. A magical journey from the Draa River in the north to Agüenit and Leyuad on the southern border with Mauritania, from the coast with the white beaches of Bojador up to the vague boundaries of the Badia. A Saharawi national territory marked by the trace of the recent history of revolution, war, resistance (intifada) and waiting. Territory, history, culture, basted from poetry full of life, love and nostalgia.
6.0The rocky desert in southwestern Algeria is the temporary home of about 150,000 refugees from Western Sahara. Goats grazing or the opening of a beauty salon are among the many scenes of everyday life of people who are eagerly awaiting the beginning of the film festival. The observational documentary captures the unwavering love of film in a place that the world has forgotten.
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.
0.0Western Sahara is a country full of stories. We chose to focus on the Sahrawi women living in Spain, where they have taken up careers in different areas: doctors, nurses, teachers, artists, lawyers, writers. We coexist with them. Some are Muslim, others have strayed away from their original culture, although they remain persistent on defending the most ancestral parts of their traditions. It is a gaze through the exiled Sahrawi woman’s eyes.
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.
0.0Salka 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
0.0Spanish 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.
0.0It describes the way of life of the Sahara people in the Western Sahara Desert, in particular it tells the story of a child bitten by a snake.
0.0Art and culture as a fight against injustice and oblivion. The Saharawi people, with creative processes, claim their right to the land from which they were expelled. A different look at the figure of the Sahrawi refugee who claims dignity and consideration.
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.
0.0It 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.