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.
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.
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.
Documentary about the arduous early years of the Sahrawi cause (1977)
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.
The documentary #FreeSultana, tells the story of a Sahrawi activist who has been under house arrest for a year with her entire family, without a court order. During this time, the Moroccan paramilitaries have destroyed her house, stoned, assaulted, raped, poisoned the Jaya sisters.
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.
Filled 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.
The Saharawi women face the thirst of the hamada, the curse of the desert, every day. They’ve built their refuge in a land where no one could survive before. For more than forty years they’ve been holding out and taking care of their people there. They ensure every drop of water is distributed according to the needs of each family … and they wait. But there’s an even more terrible thirst in their throats, for which they find no relief.
Testimonies 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)
This 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.
It 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.
The 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.
Lalia 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..
In 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.
This documentary illustrates the story of Gdeim Izik through the voices of the Sahrawis themselves, giving personal accounts of how the camp was dismantled, what happened in the following weeks, and what it meant for them, as a people and as a nation. Our aim is to shed light on what really happened in Gdeim Izik during the autumn of 2010. The documentary is homage to the courage and strength of the Sahrawi people in their historic and unprecedented action, and it seeks recognition of their role in setting off the revolutions in the Arab world. Its aim is also to report and denounce the hypocritical role of foreign governments, the Moroccan government’s concealment of facts, and the way the Spanish government has been complicit in the situation through its policy of non-intervention in a conflict in which it is unavoidably involved.
It 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.
Drawing from the inspiration of their grandmothers, singer Aziza Brahim and activist Senia Abderhaman wrestle for the independence of their people from a brutal and corporate backed Moroccan regime using culturally derived methods of music, poetry, and nonviolent resistance.
How would you claim your identity in a hostile land? How could you live under harassment and repression? How would you make your voice break through the walls of silence? Sahrawi young people living at the Occupied Territories (O.T) are required to study at the occupying country. But a river resonates all over the desert...
The film follows a couple of young boys in the Saharian refugee camp „February 27“ located in the bleak desert area of southwestern Algiers. One by one, they ran away from the occupied part of Western Sahara. Music is their only weapon in the everlasting struggle for freedom and independence of their own country – Western Sahara.