
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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0.0In the stunning and starkly beautiful landscape of Western Sahara, Walter Bencini recounts his journey to meet the Saharawi people, uprooted from their lands for decades and confined to desert tent camps named after the Moroccan cities where they once lived. It's the solidarity journey of a group of people from Valdarno, delivering the money and medicines raised through various initiatives directly into the hands of the beneficiaries.
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.
0.0For over 40 years, the Sahrawi population, as refugees, has been waiting peacefully to return to their homeland after Morocco's illegal invasion of their territory in 1976. In the Sahrawi refugee camps, located in a portion of Algerian territory, two young men meet by chance where they share a conversation that leads them to reflect on the fleetingness of life and the urgency of making dreams possible. The dream of returning home.
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.
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.
0.0This 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.
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.
0.0A 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.
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.
0.0The 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.
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".
0.0Spanish 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.
0.0The Algerian region of Tindouf is home to more than 170,000 Sahrawis, who have been living in refugee camps since 1976, when Morocco occupied the Western Sahara region. In a place of inhospitable conditions and scarcity, the Sahrawi population lives on dwindling humanitarian aid. Six percent of them face the added difficulty of coeliac disease.
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.
0.0In the middle of Western Sahara desert, where no water, no trees, no animals live but a bunch of refugees, struggling in poverty to survive the harsh habitat, the least of the problem one might face is the environmental crisis.
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.
0.0Dadah, 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.
0.0The 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.
0.0Silence 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.
Documentary about the arduous early years of the Sahrawi cause (1977)