Silent Sahara rising(2011)

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.

A documentary about the situation of the saharawi people in the refugee camps of Tindouf through the life and participation in the 2019 Sahara Marathon of the saharawi athlete and political refugee Amaidan Salah. An amateur documentary made using only a cellphone.

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.

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.

From a chronological perspective, “Saharauis, entre la ocupación y el exilio” (2010) explains the origins and key points of the Western Sahara conflict, especially since Spain handed over the territory to Morocco and Mauritania. Based on the interviews with the main people affected by the conflict, among others, this documentary shows the Sahrawi fight for survival in a society and a culture that have been able to prevail in occupied territory as well as in the refugee camps of Tindouf (Algeria).

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.

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.

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.

This report was carried out clandestinely in the occupied territories of Western Sahara. In it testimonies are heard concerning the plunder of natural resources, the repression and the camp of Gdeim Izik. The report ends with the expulsion of the journalists by the Moroccan police.

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.