ASWAD: in the Sahara, we break the silence

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.

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.

The former French colonies in Central and West Africa have been independent since 1960, but most of these countries still use the currency of the former oppressor: the CFA franc. It was linked to the French franc when it was introduced, so the national bank in Paris controlled monetary policy. Now the currency has a fixed exchange rate with the euro. The link with the European currency strongly influences the monetary policy of CFA countries. And that means the value of the CFA franc is defined by political decisions taken elsewhere, rather than by the domestic economy.

DESERT PHOSfate is an artist film that tells about the impact of phosphate on the Sahrawi community and its fate, including the surprising emergence of family gardens and their knowledge of how to farm in the desert without the processed phosphorus that had caused the dislocation of the Sahrawi nomads from their homeland of Western Sahara.

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.

The 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.

This 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.

abel and Antonio are human rights activists. They were awoke by the loud noise of sirens and the roar of thousands of screamings. They picked what they could, between what was the camcorder. They switched it on and started recording what their eyes could not believe: the savage assault and destruction of the largest protest camp ever raised in the Sahara: Gdeim Izik. Tried to contact international press but their satellite phone had been disabled. Antonio and Isabel had to find a way to show these images to the world. It wouldn't be easy. They would have to spend nine days hidden in a safe house during one of the most obscure incidents in the Moroccan history.

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.

A documentary that shows the current state of territorial limbo in which the Sahrawi people live through the gaze of those who arrive and leave, those who resist, of the occupiers and the occupieds; a multifaceted view of what is behind the facts.

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.

Awserd refugee camp, Tindouf. Fatma has not seen her brother for 30 years, since they parted after the Moroccan invasion of Western Sahara. Now he is coming on a United Nations flight to stay for a few days. While Fatma and her family prepare for the visit, they describe their life in the worst corner of the Algerian desert. Meanwhile, human rights activists in the Sahara itself are persecuted by the Moroccan authorities. Leading figures and specialists in the subject set out their theories for securing a fair solution to this conflict, which has already continued for too long.

This documentary explains the problems of Western Sahara while occupied by Morocco, the territories liberated by the Polisario Front, and the refugee camps in Tindouf (Algeria). 40 years of human rights violations, cultural, human and economic despoliation (fishing, phosphates,...), but also of resistance, fighting back, dignity, solidarity; and most of all, the women’s defining role in the establishment of a forcefully exiled population in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet.

After 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.

On 1976 twenty thousand Spaniards left the last European colony in Africa, and thousands of Saharawi’s are abandoned to their fate. Forty years have gone by and Western Sahara has become a forgotten conflict. This film offers an original point of view: the version of the conflict from the opposition to the regime within the occupying power, Morocco, and the odyssey of a group of young people to achieve these testimonies, while trying to reach the capital of the Occupied Territories, El-Aaiun.

Morocco doesn’t want you to know what’s happening in the occupied territories of the Western Sahara. The Saharawi people live under constant threat. They can’t mention either the Western Sahara or “referendum”. The situation is known as “The Problem”. Foreign journalists who attempt to take pictures or shoot with a video camera in the Western Sahara are immediately expelled from this former Spanish colony. For Saharawis it means harsh repression from the Moroccan police, who intend to silence the Saharawi population. Welcome to the last colony in Africa. We visited this place. We spent four years compiling material and gathering testimonies from journalists and other professionals who know what’s really happening in the Western Sahara. All of it undocumented until now.

In May 2005, after 30 years of Moroccan occupation, Saharawi students initiated a series of peaceful demonstrations demanding their right to the United Nations-mandated referendum on Western Saharan independence. The Moroccan authorities responded with a brutal campaign of repression, detaining and torturing human rights activists as well as Saharawi students and children as young as eight years old.

Many Saharawis are claiming to return to war in order to break the impasse of wainting during 40 years. However, the Sahrawi nonviolent activists argue that they are pushing Morocco to an untenable position. For them, the nonviolent action and the respect of human rights make Sahrawis part of the new world that is coming and also they are building a sane society. The documentary explores this debate with activists of the refugee camps and of the occupied territories.

25 minutes in the Sahara, is a snapshot of the 34 years of division in which resistance and justice for the Sahrawi community has played out. 1500 seconds of images and voices are heard from exile; voices that are not silent under occupation; that speak as immigrants and that hold their own as an international human platform. 1500 seconds to open and not close your eyes to the reality of these men and women, part of our History. A present of robbed freedoms, properties exploited and forgotten by those who hold the key to the globalisation of toture and repression. A bid, at the end of division, to grant the Right to a Future in the Present, from the West and democratic action in the name of the Sahara.

Tell them I exist paints the portraits of Naâma Asfari, a Sahrawi jurist and pro-independence activist sentenced to 30 years detention in Morocco; and of his wife, Claude Mangin, who from prison visits to diplomatic meetings, from filing complaints for torture to shows of support, continues to mobilize and raise awareness of the situation in Western Sahara, and of the fate of her husband, in the hope of his release or at least a new and fair trial.