Magic Sahara

Education Center for disabled children located in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria. Despite the precarious conditions in which this population lives since 40 years ago, the Polisario Front as the representative of the Sahrawi people has promoted inclusion as a way to avoid marginalization and discrimination of one of the most vulnerable populations within these territories: children with special needs. "Castro" is the man who devotes his life to this beautiful project fighting all odds: physical, psychic, social, economic, and even the incomprehensions of his own society. The Sahrawis are living (resisting) in one of the harshest deserts on Earth but Castro has the magic formula to achieve the inclusion of these wonderful beings in his society and in the rest of the world: MUSAWAT, EQUALITY.

In 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.

The 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.

In 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.

Tito likes playing football and tries to get good marks at school but unfortunately, he has some issues that shouldn't have children of his age. Nobody as the Sahrawi people knows what means to be on the map and being lost and forgotten at the same time.

This biographical docudrama traces the life of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, from his birth in Alsace, up to the age of 30 when he made the decision to go to French Equatorial Africa and build his jungle hospital. The latter half of the film encompasses a full day in the hospital-village, following the octogenarian Samaritan in his daily rounds.

Albert Schweitzer - Anatomie eines Heiligen

Forty 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.

Refugees in Algeria since 1975, the Saharawi have had to forge another life path, fighting to return home. Their children, a generation born in exile to parents born in exile, tell the story and struggle of their people, the Saharawi, through their dreams, hopes, and strength.

In this exclusive broadcast, Democracy Now! breaks the media blockade and goes to occupied Western Sahara in the northwest of Africa to document the decades-long Sahrawi struggle for freedom and Morocco's violent crackdown. Morocco has occupied the territory since 1975 in defiance of the United Nations and the international community. Thousands have been tortured, imprisoned, killed and disappeared while resisting the Moroccan occupation. A 1,700-mile wall divides Sahrawis who remain under occupation from those who fled into exile. The international media has largely ignored the occupation—in part because Morocco has routinely blocked journalists from entering Western Sahara. But in late 2016 Democracy Now! managed to get into the Western Saharan city of Laayoune, becoming the first international news team to report from the occupied territory in years.

Spanish 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.

Young 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.

This film presents, through the eyes four students - Gemma, Colo, Cristian and Mireia - their experience of the trip, the feelings that moved them, the work carried out in the camps and, above all, their contribution to raising awareness of the unresolved difficulties the Sahrawi people face.

In the depths of the Algerian desert the Sahrawi people have been dwelling in the refugee camps for over 40 years. Camps gradually turned into settlements, named after towns in their homeland Western Sahara. One of them is called El Aaiún.

Siya, Dumaha, Mata and Aziz are Saharawi refugees that live in camps in Tindouf (Algeria). They show us the daily extreme harshness of an exile that lasts for 40 years. We can discover the unknown reality of torture, mines and maimed people, child malnutrition or mental illnesses that plague the Saharawi people, who are condemned to live away from their homeland.

Mektub portrays a day in the life in the Sahrawi refugee camps, along with the declarations of some of its protagonists. But behind this seemingly calm life hides a common fight, which is to continue fighting and protesting to accomplish the single common goal that all Sahrawis have as a nation: to take back the occupied land, rebuild their country, and reunite with their families.

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.

An approach to Sahrawi culture, different aspects of daily life, culture and the struggle of the Sahrawi people in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria, and in the area of the liberated territories of Tifariti.

Straddling 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.

Tebraa 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.