SCREENING THE SAHARA:
CINEMA AS A VOICE
FOR REFUGEES AT THE
WORLD‟S MOST REMOTE
FILM FESTIVAL
IF A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND
WORDS, CAN A FEW MOVING PICTURES
SPEAK LOUD ENOUGH TO MAKE 200,000 OF
THE SAHARA‟S “FORGOTTEN PEOPLE”
HEARD?
BY MAYA PANKALLA JANUARY 2010
Films are a powerful and evocative tool for
fosteringunderstanding and tolerance in the world.
-Nelson Mandela, Nobel Laureate for Peace
For a small refugee camp in the middle of the
chapped Algerian Sahara, the mud-hut
settlement of Dakhla manages to come
surprisingly alive. Jeeps and Land Rovers create
an impermanent web of tracks, schoolchildren skip
away from their desks to work on special song and
dance routines, and small groups of women
dressed in colourful malfahs—light cotton robes
that cover the hair and body completely—chatter
excitedly on the way to the town centre. On the
dusty outskirts of town, a greeting committee
unloads a half thousand sweaty visitors, mainly
Spaniards, from the derelict school buses that have
jerked them around for the past four hours.
Off in the distance: a handful of palm trees,
a series of make-shift movie screens, and the town
bar (known for its abundance of coca-cola and
strict lack of alcohol.) This is the town centre,
where adolescent Saharawi boys strut their knock-
off designer duds, journalists congregate at the
camp‘s only internet café, and masses of tourists
and Saharawi alike gather, confused, for an
opportunity to volunteer, practice their
intercultural communication skills, or simply get
their hands on the week‘s festival program. As far
as anyone here is concerned, for a week each year,
this is the centre of the world. This is an
international film festival. In a desert. This is the
FISAHARA.
The Saharawi refugee camps, located in an
arid South-western corner of uninhabited Algerian
land, are far from the kind of place where one
might expect to find a star-studded international
gathering, let alone the adequate facilities in which
to house it. In fact, with Dakhla resting two
hundred kilometres from the nearest Algerian
settlement, a military air base at Tindouf, and with
each of those flat kilometres a déjà-vu of the one
before it, the camps are far from anywhere at all.
In the words of Oscar-winning actor Javier
Bardem, who attended the FISAHARA in 2008
along with big-name musician Manu Chao, this
slab of desert is ―the backyard of hell‖ (Culshaw).
Others still, have termed the barren terrain ―the
desert of deserts‖ and even ―the Devil‘s Garden‖
(Simanowitz). Unfortunately, while these words
may ring true with the nearly 200,000 refugees
that live there, for over three decades another term
has also stood, undesirable, at the foreground:
―home.‖
Yet, if the situation of refugees worldwide
is true to the sometime suggested adage, ―you
have two options: die or survive,‖ then in the last
seven years the Saharawi, with the help of the
Sahara International Film Festival (FISAHARA,)
have added a welcome third alternative. After
spending more than thirty years displaced and
ignored in one of the world‘s most hostile desert
regions, refugees from Western Sahara are using
cinema to showcase their dire situation.
Unsatisfied with the abysmal conditions of mere
―survival,‖ Saharawi men, women and children are
welcoming the big screen in the hopes that a little
movie magic will help put them on the world
radar, allowing them to finally ―live‖ and ―exist.‖
Since its inception in 2003, the yearly,
Spanish-run FISAHARA has brought the wonder
of film as well as a growing number of actors,
filmmakers, and cause supporters to four Saharawi
refugee camps, for a week every spring. The 2009
instalment, which ran from 4 May to 10 May,
drew in a record amount of visitors—two planes,
each seating 270 people flew in from Madrid
alone. With the majority of the festival‘s desert-
bound audience never having seen a film in their
lives, the FISAHARA has yet to cultivate the
glamour and sophistication of many of its African
adversaries, let alone that of festival deities such
as Cannes and Sundance. At this desert festival,
canisters of film travel alongside milk crates and
cardboard boxes of medicine in the backs of dusty
Jeeps; here, a red carpet would scarcely be visible
after a few minutes of Western Saharan sandstorm
anyway.
The inaccessibility of the camps and the
cinematic inexperience of the refugees instil the
FISAHARA with a notable innocence: this is not
the kind of festival that dissects the specific
achievements of particular films, but rather one
that celebrates the mere existence of film, and
perhaps more importantly, that of its spectators. It
remains the first and only film festival in the world
to take place in a refugee camp and is
unquestionably the most remote. If ―film festivals
are particularly important to the survival of world
cinema, art cinema, and independent cinema‖ (de
Valck 36), then the FISAHARA is equally vital to
the survival of this marginalized part of the
world—of its art and its independence. This no
less evident than in the festival‘s mandate:
The Sahara International Film Festival
uses film as a way to bring education,
culture and leisure activities to the
Sahrawi people in refugee camps, while
at the same focusing international
attention on the plight of the Sahrawi
refugees. (FiSAHARA)
With a fifth of a million ―forgotten people‖ spread
out over the four refugee camps—Smara, Ayoun,
Ausserd, and Dakhla—the organizers of the
Sahara Film Festival are at no lack for local
audiences, audiences that eagerly take in the
worldly messages of the films and by doing so
hope to send out an urgent message of their own.
Because intellectual, visual and aural
stimulation are needs frequently overlooked in
humanitarian responses—naturally, first priority is
accorded to matters of subsistence, health care,
and physical and legal protection—Saharawi
refugees have largely been deprived of arts,
entertainment, and film and video technologies.
For these desert dwellers, the FISHARA is an
opportunity to travel out into world, via the exotic
images onscreen, and to bring the outside world in
to one of the most desolate places on earth. Once
a year, when old Spanish city-buses cart in
hundreds of camera-laden visitors, the Saharawi
people engage in a week-long session of Show
and Tell. On the list of things to see: the
children‘s and women‘s schools, the hospital, the
orchard, the town centre, the dunes, the clump of
palm trees, the camels, the goats, this haima, that
haima, the gathering sandstorm, the great blue
sky, and anything that might attract attention and
fit adequately into a photograph.
Several mantras surface throughout the
course of the festival week: ―Free Sahara,‖ ―No to
the Wall of Shame‖ and ―Here in the Sahara…,‖
the last of which is followed by one of many
culture specific statements (―…we practice Islam,‖
―…it is very hot,‖ ―…we don‘t drink alcohol,‖
―…we don‘t have money,‖ ―…we don‘t have
jobs.‖) It may not be an easy task to convey a
lifetime in the Sahara to visitors who spend no
more than a week in the camps, yet it is a
necessary one. ―Because [the Saharawi] have kept
to the ceasefire and not gone in for guerrilla
activity or suicide bombing,‖ writes journalist
Peter Culshaw, ―they have been out of the news,
often described as "the forgotten people"
(Culshaw). Thus, while the FISAHARA boasts a
week of enticing entertainment, its political
motivations are hardly kept secret: the poster for
the 2009 festival may feature an audience viewing
a makeshift movie screen attached to the side of a
semi truck, but the first thing to catch the eye is
the bright red graffiti on the side of the truck. The
larger-than-life letters simply read Free Sahara,
―Sahara Libre.‖
FROM COLONIZED TO REFUGEES: IN
THE FACE OF MOROCCAN HUMAN
RIGHTS ABUSES, A GROWING
SAHARAWI NATIONALISM
An indescribable climate of terror reigns. The
abduction and arrest campaigns often occur at home
or in the streets. Searches by the police are
systematic. Everyone is suspect. Even the cowards
are not saved. Since 1975 there have been many
disappearances.
-Aminettou Mint Ali Mohamed, January 1984
In maintaining and asserting this independence, this
group of refugees has pulled itself up from the
tragedies of the exodus from the Western Sahara and
the threatened genocide of 1975-6, to prepare
actively and positively for the return to the Saharawi
Arab Democratic Republic, once the struggle results
in independence.
-Anne Lippert, ―The Saharawi refugee origins and
organization, 1975-85‖
International concern about Western Sahara
emerged in 1964, when the United Nations
General Assembly passed its first resolution
declaring the Western Saharan people‟s right
to self-determination. (The thinly populated
Western Sahara, an arid slab of land about half the
size of Spain, attractive primarily in its rich
phosphate deposits, had been colonized by the
Spanish since the Berlin Conference of 1884.) On
May 12 1975, a United Nations Missions of
Inquiry traveled to Western Sahara and recorded
findings that ―there was an overwhelming
consensus among Saharans within the Territory in
favour of independence and opposing integration
with any neighbouring country‖ (Smith 139).
Yet Spain strayed from the norms of
decolonization and on November 14 1975, by
virtue of the Madrid Accord or Tripartite
Agreement, Spain transferred the territory, what it
called ―the Spanish Sahara,‖ to Morocco and
Mauritania; the former claimed the northern two-
thirds, with the latter held on to the southern third.
On 27 Febraury 1976, the Saharawi Arab
Democratic Republic (SADR) was proclaimed,
with the Polisario Front (Popular Front for the
Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro)
serving as its political-military wing.
The Polisario had been fighting a war of
liberation against Spain since 1973, and it now
turned its forces against both Morocco and
Mauritania, causing Mauritania to withdraw from
the Western Saharan territory and to make peace
in 1979. Morocco still occupies roughly two-thirds
of Western Sahara, and has since built a sand and
stone defence wall—known as the berm—that
slices horizontally through Western Sahara and is
equipped with sophisticated radars, surveillance
devices, a power-house of Moroccan troops, and
masses of hidden landmines.
For the Saharawi, ―people of the Sahara,‖
this over 2700 kilometre long barrier is El Muro
de la Verguenza (The Wall of Shame,) which
keeps them from their capital, El-Ayoun, the Bou-
Craa phosphate mines, Dakhla, Smara and a few
smaller towns. Even today, with the refugees a far
distance on the berm‘s dusty, unwanted side, the
barricade is hardly forgotten: international
activists rally at the wall in protest several times a
year, Saharawi musicians sing out their objections
and, in the refugee camps, more than a few
hobbling silhouettes have left a limb behind with
the mines.
The war in Western Sahara saw the
tragic deterioration of human rights, while a
prohibition in free speech prevented almost all
foreign media from entering the occupied territory.
Thousands of individuals and families, potential
threats to the regime, ―disappeared.‖ Many were,
and are still, held by Moroccan forces in army
camps, prisons and secret penal colonies, which
are said to exist in the South of Morocco.
Detainees are not granted the right to lawyer nor
phone call, let alone to a trial.
In 1975 and 1976, an inquiry by Amnesty
International found that ―Testimony from former
disappeared persons, who subsequently escaped or
were released, suggests that the Saharawis
abducted are routinely subjected to imprisonment,
torture and death‖ (Smith 143). Other reports
speak of individuals being thrown from planes and
helicopters, or ―drowned in the Saguia el-Hamra
river and in the sea‖ (Smith 145). Over thirty years
after the initial atrocities, the Saharawi people in
exile are still hearing similar stories. At the 2009
FISAHARA, a middle-aged man named Bah
recounted the tale of a young Saharawi detainee
who was imprisoned in Morocco, tortured, denied
an education, forced into drug addiction, and
released to wander the streets of a foreign city,
narcotized and alone. In December of 2009,
Saharawi activist Aminatou Haidar entered into
her second month of hunger strike in protest of
being denied admittance into her own country—
she still resides in the occupied territory—where
her children and family awaited. She has since
been allowed to return to her Western Saharan
homeland, following pressure on Moroccan
authorities from international public figures and
interventions by the United States and France.
When the Moroccan invasion began, a
large part of the Saharawi population fled to
camps organized by the Polisario, far from the
cities, in an attempt to escape increasing horrors.
In November 1975, and January, February and
April 1976, Moroccan forces raided the make-shift
camps with napalm, phosphorous and cluster
bombs, killing 2,500 refugees and causing the
surviving remainder to seek refuge across the
Algerian border, near the south-west military base
of Tindouf. For over thirty years, Algeria has
played an instrumental role in delivering and
donating food and supplies to the camps; Algeria
provides refugees with special Algerian passports
for travel, as well.
The refugees that left Western Sahara came
from ―a number of tribes, sub-tribes and fractions
of mixed Arab, Berber and black African descent‖
(Lippert 151); many speak both their native
Hassaniya Arabic tongue, as well as the
colonizer‘s Spanish. As part of the SADR‘s
policy—Article Six of their Constitution reads ―all
citizens are equal before the law and have the
same rights and duties‖ (Lippert 151)—the
Saharawis have moved past tribal and family
origins to create a virtually caste-less people
unified in the common struggle for independence.
Making a life in the dusty bowels of the
Sahara, where water and vegetation are scarce,
winds and sands destroy the tents, and
temperatures can climb to 60°C at midday, or drop
below -18°C at night, depending on the season,
has hardly been easy. While some refugees had
nomadic lives prior to the 1975 and 1976 exodus,
many had been permanently settled in Western
Sahara‘s larger cities, and were unaccustomed to
this rough, desolate existence. Some arrived at the
camps by Land Rover, while others marched on
foot from as far as 1,400 kilometres away. Most
lacked water, food, clothing, and shelter, and
many suffered from ―exposure, wounds,
dehydration and shock‖ (Lippert 153), as well as
from post-bombing scars and disfigurations.
One look at the camp of Dakhla today—
with its colourful schoolhouses, for both women
and children, its hospital, overstaffed by Saharawi
medics trained abroad, its network of streets,
markets, colourful homes, and solar panels, its
handful of gift shops and pizza places, and the
ever-present opportunity to drink a lukewarm
bottle of Coca-Cola—makes it difficult to fathom
the town in its skeletal, post-exodus chaos. Yet, in
1975 and 1976, reports of the League of Red Cross
Societies noted the abysmal conditions in the
camps: ―A medical student who has 4,000 people
under his care showed us all his equipment, one
pair of tweezers and a hypodermic syringe‖
(Lippert 153).
Following the escape of 1976, refugees
received on-site assistance from Médecins sans
Frontières as well as a Cuban Medical Team, and
financial relief from organizations such as the
League of Red Cross Societies and the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees. The Polisario Front
readied the refugee population for survival by
dividing its people into twenty-six camps in a 200
km area along the Algerian border (each of these
camps belong to one of six dairas (camp
communities) which in turn belong to one of four
wilayas (provinces).) The Polisario, with the
backing of foreign aid, assured that daily needs
were met: it implemented sanitation rules, helped
construct hospitals, schools, and homes, created
kitchen areas, and crafted cisterns, shallow-wells,
and boreholes (all of which currently have
chlorinated water supplies.) In wetter areas, the
Polisario developed goat herds and farming. Yet
because the dry, rocky land is a stubborn barrier to
agriculture, even today the Saharawi are forced to
rely on water and food sources, mainly grains and
milk, from abroad. In her paper ―The Saharawi
refugees: origins and organization, 1975-85,‖
historian Anne Lippert describes this inevitable
dependency:
―Since the Saharawis cannot yet return to
their own independent nation and since
they do not benefit from the natural
resources of that nation, medical
supplies, vitamin supplements, milk for
children, inoculation materials,
laboratory equipment and advanced
training of health care personnel must all
be supplied by outside humanitarian
groups.‖ (157)
Still, if the Polisario has been unable to provide
the Saharawi with tangible necessities, it has made
every effort to build and ready a new society for
the dreamed return home. In the refugee camps,
education is both mandatory and gender inclusive;
where only five percent of the population was
literate at the time of the post-colonial exodus,
now a
remarkable
ninety-five
percent of men
and women
can read and
write (Thorne).
Unfortunately,
three decades
of Saharawi
resilience,
national pride
and
preparations
for a better
future, have yet
to place the
Saharawi on a
global list of ―refugees to care about‖ or ―conflicts
to solve.‖ Following years of war in the area, a
1991 United Nations ceasefire mandate stated that
a referendum should decide the fate of the country.
Yet because the Saharawi people have ―not gone
in for guerrilla activity or suicide bombing‖
(Culshaw), the situation has hardly garnered
international attention, leaving Western Sahara
under Moroccan rule.
In 1987, Saharawi historian and then
Executive Director of The Western Sahara
Campaign (U.S.A.) for Human Rights &
Humanitarian Relief, Teresa K. Smith called for
international recognition of the grave human rights
abuses in the area. Voicing what many Western
Sahara activists, both Saharawi and non, still feel
today, Smith wrote:
―The phenomenon of disappearances has
touched hundreds of Saharawis. These
missing persons are the victims of a
disregard for law, little short of state
terrorism. […] A great injustice will be
done to the disappeared Saharawis if the
international community does not persist
by asking: ‗Where are they?‘‖ (148)
Today, tens of thousands of Saharawis still live in
the ―occupied territory,‖ while close to 200,000
―forgotten‖ refugees have existed near the
Algerian border for over thirty years. Here, they
subsist on international aid in an inhospitable land
where decaying goat hooves lay strewn across the
sands, a toilet is any chosen place in the distant
horizon, and ―wealth is a dwelling with electric
light-powered by a car battery‖ (Loewenberg in
Newsweek). Here, they wait for freedom, for
reunions with lost people and places, and for the
chance to proudly fill in ―Saharawi‖ under
nationality, without getting instantly detained by
Moroccan authorities.
THE FISAHARA: A TRACE OF
HOLLYWOOD IN THE DESERT OF
DESERTS We don’t want to live here. It is a very inhospitable
place. But the film festival alleviates the boredom
and hardship of being here. It is kind of an escape.
-Zrug Lula, Saharawi refugee
Today we say a free Sahara without walls or mines.
Today the camera is the sign of our identity.
-Khadija Hamdi, Saharawi Minister of Culture
The poster for the 2009 Sahara International
Film Festival shows an audience watching an
outdoor screen attached to the back of a semi
truck. In early May, this very poster—scrawled
with ―Free Sahara‖—hung proudly above a small
stage in the desert, alongside the green, white, and
red flag of the Saharawi Arab Democratic
Republic. Onstage, a middle-aged Saharawi
representative introduced the festival.
―Art is an expression, an expression
through which the artist expresses his support for
the cause!‖ he announced, as a half Spanish, half
Saharawi crowd erupted into cheers. The flash of
cameras moved
from festive to
blinding, while
strong winds
kept
photographers
actively
brushing the
plastic bags
away from
their lenses
(anyone
carrying a
camera in this
dust-blown
desert has
learned to wrap
it tightly in thin
grocery bags.)
―We always have hope,‖ the speaker
continued, ―that the world will open its eyes to the
cause of the Saharawi. We are not Moroccan! We
are Saharawi!‖ From beside the stage, a large
placard of Che Guevara—advertising Steven
Soderbergh‘s two-part film CHE—promised
bloodshed and revolution, onscreen, if nowhere
else. Whether for its cinematic merit, or perhaps
more by virtue of its inspiring and relatable
content, CHE: El Guerrero went on to pick up the
Festival First Place prize—a living white camel—
at the Closing Ceremony a few days later.
The Spanish-run FISAHARA (Festival
Internacional de Cine del Sahara) is amongst the
youngest of over two dozen film festivals that
enchant viewers across the African continent every
year. Since the festival‘s launch in late fall of 2003
in the Dakhla camp, it has returned every year—
typically in March and April, though in 2009 it
was scheduled for May—in one of four Saharawi
camps. In the past two years, the Sahara Festival
has remained stationary in Dakhla, leading the
camp‘s inhabitants to hope that it might stay there
for good.
The first FISAHARA was organized
largely by Peruvian film director Javier
Corcuera—who in the words of critic Paul Laverty
―could persuade the devil himself to examine his
conscience‖ (Laverty)—in ―a bid to draw attention
to the Saharawi's forgotten cause‖ (Loewenberg in
Newsweek). Since then, FISAHARA has
showcased various Spanish-dominated films and
has garnered the attention of numerous celebrities
(not surprisingly, most of which are Spanish.) At
the 2008 festival, musician Manu Chao and actor
Javier Bardem (who earlier that year received the
first Academy Award won by a Spanish male) said
they were attending ―to raise the profile of the
plight of the Saharawi refugees‖ (Culshaw).
Journalist Peter Culshaw, who attended and
covered the festival that same year, witnessed the
need for a collective action between refugees and
celebrities:
When I spoke to several Saharawi
refugees in a camp this month in
Southern Algeria they felt they had two
options. One: violence - freedom
fighting, from their point of view;
terrorism, according to their enemies - or
two: hosting an arts festival and getting
some celebrities along to garner some
media attention. (Culshaw)
Like any other film festival, FISAHARA yearns
for ‗buzz‘ and relies on the attendance of
celebrities to generate it. Though unlike with
many of the more commercial film festivals, the
word of mouth at this desert extravaganza has less
to do with the films and those who made them and
more to do with those who are watching them.
Gathering enough funds to bring big-
screen cinema to ―the backyard of hell‖ has
proved no easy task. Currently, the Sahara
International Film Festival is financed by public
bodies and solidarity associations, such as the
Saharawi-backed Polisario Front. Furthermore,
the festival is sponsored by a number of Spanish
businesses and organizations including the
Spanish International Cooperation Agency for
Development, two Spanish banks (Caja Duero and
Caja Madrid,) the European Citizens Foundation,
and the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture
and Sport. The municipality of San Sebastian also
backs the event, its own San Sebastian
International Film Festival having declared ―its
support for the world‘s first and only film festival
held at a refugee camp, making an important
contribution to the creation of a cultural platform
for the Sahrawi people under difficult conditions‖
(FiSAHARA).
While the FISAHARA has been ―warmly
welcomed by both public and private institutions,
and has received enormous response and support
from professionals of the audio-visual sector‖
(FiSAHARA) in Spain, raising money has not
come without struggles. In the first year of the
festival, founder Corcuera had to ―persuade a
cinema owner to lend him two precious film
projectors as well as invit[e] a rock impresario to
make up the shortfall from funds raised from local
authorities and usual solidarity sources‖ (Laverty).
With its skimpy budget, the Sahara
Festival hardly boasts any luxuries: tourists,
media, and celebrities alike brave the inevitable
delays on Air Algerie, and fly into a military
airport; visitors ride for a bumpy four hours across
stretches of hard sand, rocks and dust in old
Spanish school-buses; everyone sleeps on rugs in
tents or mud huts; all shower by means of ladle
and water-filled bucket. ―It‘s not ideal,‖ says one
Saharawi organizer, "but at least they are
witnesses to the real situation‖ (Lula in Newbery).
Even the FISAHARA official website is not shy
about the festival‘s financial needs, giving cyber
visitors a chance to ―collaborate financially‖ with
the project by depositing funds directly into a
Spanish-based FISAHARA bank account.
Fortunately, what the Sahara Film Festival
lacks in monetary wealth is easily made up for in
the abundance of local audiences and steady
amount of foreign visitors. As an initiative to bring
education and entertainment to the thousands of
stranded Saharawi refugees, the festival‘s target
audience members are precisely those who are
already there—the same people who have been
waiting in the Algerian desert for over thirty years.
Film and festival critic Marijke de Valck explains
why a marginalized audience can readily sell a
film festival‘s image:
The survival of the phenomenon of film
festivals and its development into a
global and widespread festival circuit has
been dependent on the creation of film
festivals as a zone, a liminal state, where
the cinematic products can bask in the
attention they receive for their aesthetic
achievements, cultural specificity, or
social relevance. (de Valck 37)
If a festival can indeed find a niche and
recognition in its ―liminality‖ and social relevance,
then the FISAHARA is set. Not only are the films
as well as the festival itself imbued with social
sensitivity and relevance, but the festival is set in a
remote zone, a ―liminal state‖, a refugee‘s limbo.
If the chosen audience for this festival are the very
people who inhabit this zone, then the second most
important audience is certainly that of actors,
filmmakers and general celebrities—an audience
without which the plight of the Saharawi people
remains silent to rest of the world. Fortunately,
the dire conditions in this windblown desert have
caused the visiting ‗famous folk‘ to take their role
as necessary audience members quite seriously.
Since the first year of the festival, visiting
celebrities have signed renewed manifestos
pledging to share the art of cinema and to support
the cause of the Saharawi. Meanwhile Free Sahara
activists, such as Free Western Sahara Network
president Stefan Simanowitz, who after a trip to
the FISAHARA in 2009 quit his job to take on the
Saharawi struggle full-time, are equally aware of
the power of celebrity in generating media
attention. ―We need first class, not second class or
third class, stars,‖ admits Simanowitz, who is
hoping to free the Sahara in the quickest and
biggest way possible by convincing actors such as
Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem to make the trip
in 2010. (Apparently, Cruz couldn‘t make it in
2009 as she was tied up with a screening at
Cannes.)
On average, FISAHARA draws around
400 foreign visitors every year, though this
number is slowly rising, with the last festival
boasting roughly 600 foreigners. Audiences are by
no means limited to the ―already there‖ (the
Saharawi refugees) and the ―deliberately invited‖
(various current
celebrities), and
tend to include
an assortment
of film buffs,
humanitarian
workers, return
visitors, and
curious
sightseers
interested in the
culture and
conditions of
the camps. The
exotic setting
and
circumstances
of the festival
make for an interesting treatment of audience and
of the notion of ―viewing‖: while fascinated
refugees gaze at their first cinema screens, visitors
seem more transfixed by the films‘ intended
audience than by the actual films. As 2008 festival
attendee and journalist Samuel Loewenberg points
out: ―the film types were predictably thrilled with
their desert adventure and soon went about in
Saharawi chic-brightly coloured scarves and robes
for the women, black turbans for the men‖
(Loewenberg in Newsweek).
Since Western Sahara was a Spanish
colony until the early 1970s, it is unsurprising that
Spaniards—many with a post-colonial feeling of
culpability—are most numerous amongst visiting
celebrities, and that Spanish language films
dominate. In 2003, the first Sahara International
Film Festival showcased twenty-one feature length
films, most of which were from Spain. In 2005,
film selections were still predominantly Spanish
yet included entries from Denmark, India and
Cuba, as well as the Spanish film The Sea Inside
which took home the Oscar for Best Foreign Film
that same year. In 2008, films from Britain,
Mexico and Mongolia appeared alongside the
usual Spanish works to make an official selection
of 29 films.
This past year, the FISAHARA screened
over fifty films, ranging from black and white
silent comedies and children‘s cartoons, to an
international array of the dramatic, the joyous, the
inspirational, and the revolutionary. As well as
enjoying a special selection of Algerian films—
Algeria was this year‘s honoured guest country—
for the first time, audiences were shown short
films, many of which had been directed by
Saharawi refugees themselves. Venues at the
festival have been make-shift since the start: some
of the films are shown in mud-brick warehouses,
some are screened in cleared-out restaurants and
schoolhouses, and others still are projected onto
screens mounted on semi trucks and viewed under
the stars. Since the beginning, Spanish and Arabic
subtitles have accompanied each screening.
Given the unique setup and destitute
location of this festival, a cinema experience in the
Sahara is likely just as fresh to Saharawi first-
timers as it is to film critics and connoisseurs.
Loewenberg remembers the instant appeal of the
2008 festival:
The films were shown on an ad hoc
screen under the Saharan night sky, the
screenings joyously chaotic with children
running around shouting, teenagers and
adults sitting on the desert sand, all
watching scenes from Danish farm life,
the Argentine ghettos, health clinics in
Equatorial Guinea and Indian slums.
(Loewenberg in Times)
On top of these star-lit screenings, for which the
audience consists of both humans and the not
infrequent camels and goats, the five day festival
enjoys roundtables with cinema professionals, and
the chance to unwind at both the concert in the
dunes, and the closing concert. (The 2009 surprise
band, a Spanish politically-inclined reggae group
by the name of Macaco, kept Saharawi men,
women and children, as well as their visitors,
singing and dancing until the wee morning hours.)
Video, film and photography workshops and
debates run alongside parades, exhibitions and
camel races.
Essentially, the FISHARA is only a part
of ―an ambitious project called "Cinema for the
Saharawi people", which expects to be opening
videotheques and audio-visual training workshops
in the camps‖ (Sahara News.) Thus, the festival is
―not all about stars and award-winners‖
(Loewenberg in Times), and professional directors,
cinematographers and professors spend nearly half
the day teaching basic film production,
documentary making and children‘s animation.
True, the film festival can be an important
messenger to the Saharawi—several featured films
―promote health, peace, and human rights, or […]
warn against HIV/AIDS or gender violence‖
(Newbery)—yet FISAHARA‘s main focus is
cultural exchange and exploration.
The old, and perhaps rightfully over-
quoted, proverb—give a man a fish and you feed
him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed
him for a lifetime—comes to mind. A large part of
the FISAHARA‘s goal is to give the Saharawi the
tools to be able to transmit their unique culture,
and plight, as they see it and for themselves. In
celebration of the coming together of an
international community and in appreciation of the
Saharawi culture, artistic events at the festival are
filmed and played back to the audience at the very
end.
With the very cause-oriented
FISAHARA, sponsoring and publicity are
necessary elements in the building of integrity and
status for both the festival and the Saharawi
people. The festival‘s apparent lack a of an award
system beyond the single white camel and its ―no
man‘s land‖ accessibility are far from the
circumstances under which both budding and
commercial filmmakers aim to release their
―masterpieces.‖ The fact that the fifty jury
members are potentially not only first time-
viewers of these films but first time viewers of
film in general, hardly helps the festival‘s
credibility as a serious film festival. Yet that‘s the
point. The Sahara International Film Festival will
never be one of the world‘s premiere film
festivals. But, if all goes well, it may just become
one of the world‘s highly exposed humanitarian
causes, through the medium of film.
FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE
DESERT, A SAHARAWI VOICE:
CINEMA AS A POLITICAL TOOL You don’t have to have everything fine to want to
see movies. You see them because you want to
connect, to communicate from your position on
the other side of the moon, to check whether you
still belong to the same reality as the rest of the
world.
-Haris Pasovic, 1993 Sarajevo
Film Festival Director
Your videos are going to be a personal
communication and obviously, in your case, the
personal is political.
-Isabel Santaolalla, ―Digital Postcards‖ video
workshop leader, FISAHARA 2009
All forms of storytelling are important. If you
don’t have military muscle or political weight,
you have to gain legitimacy and truth to get out.
-Giles Foreman, Caravanserai Productions
For thirty years, the Saharawi have waited
for the kind of global response that will send
them back to their native homeland of
Western Sahara. The initial hurdles of refugee
life have been overcome, soldiers have gone off
to the front, women have raised a new
generation of nationalists in the camps, and the
long wait for freedom has set in. The 1991
United Nations ceasefire mandate put a
tentative end to war activities, yet failed to
bring a promised referendum and potential re-
migration. And so, the ―forgotten people‖ are
dwindling quietly in the desert. Habituation has
made the unbearable bearable.
Enter the Sahara International Film
Festival: the juxtaposition of film festival
glamour with a make-shift town in middle
Sahara is enough to draw a crowd. And draw
crowds it has: since its inception in 2003,
visitors, journalists and stars with million dollar
smiles have made the trip to the camps. At the
2009 festival, a roomful of Spanish, British and
Algerian journalists worked tirelessly to send
festival updates to a variety of international
newspapers, via both personal laptop computers
and those supplied by the camp. Visitors
without media deadlines to meet could also
send off an e-mail from one of a handful of
comparatively ancient and slow-running
computers at the camps sole internet café.
Every year, even the non-writerly types manage
to spread the festival experience and Saharawi
cause through photographs—hardly anyone
comes to the FISAHARA without a camera—
and word of mouth.
If the only way to put the Saharawi
camps and their political agenda on the global
radar is to do so through the spotlight of a
cinema celebration, then Sahara residents and
supporters have few objections. Pro-Saharawi
organizations such as London-based Sandblast,
which works with the refugees to express their
struggles through the arts, bring in workshops
year-round, and continue to draw visitors to the
festival and the political issue. Sandblast knows
firsthand that ―the arts have done more than
simply express, they have been instruments of
resistance and change too, not least in helping
to build the new social and political vision of
the Saharawi state-in-exile, known as the
Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic‖
(Sandblast). Inspired by what he saw at the
2009 FISAHARA and convinced that the issue
might get noticed by the British government
through a series of blogs and articles,
symposiums, and marches on Parliament,
journalist Stefan Simanowitz gave birth to yet
another campaign—The Free Western Sahara
Network—soon after his return from a first-
time trip to the camps.
Like most of her ―forgotten‖ people,
Saharawi Culture Minister Khadija Hamdi sees
the importance of the media coverage that
comes with this anomaly of a film festival; in
the opening page of the 2009 FISAHARA
program, her welcome message affirms that
artistic means are well worth the political, and
human, ends:
[T]his artistic initiative has come to
represent a civilized form of
solidarity, uniting with our legitimate
cause and reaffirming the noble
objective for which we have been
honored with visits by great artists,
such as Javier Bardem, Manu Chao,
and all those who believe in the role
of the seventh art in refining tastes and
enriching human experience.‖
(FiSAHARA09 Program 3)
Fortunately, like many of his colleagues, actor
Javier Bardem is glad to attend despite the
festival‘s clear lack of frills for his own career:
―"If me being here helps in any way, I am glad
to help". A bit different from the Oscars? "That
was for professional recognition – this is
something else"‖ (Bardem in Culshaw).
The FISAHARA has the support of
actors, filmmakers and producers, ranging from
Pedro Almodovar, Eduardo Galeano and Luis
Garcia Berlanga, to Syliva Munt and Pilar
Bardem. Will getting a few celebrities down to
middle-Sahara make any difference? Maybe
not. But, according to journalist Peter Culshaw,
―Bardem and Chao's suggestion that the
Spanish, as the ex-colonial masters of Western
Sahara, were responsible for the situation and
should help sort out the mess, did get
significant coverage in the Spanish media and
has put some pressure on Prime Minister José
Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's government to do
something‖ (Culshaw). If visitors to the Sahara
Film Festival can share the Saharawi plight
with the outside world, then they can help give
these marginalized desert people a voice and
perhaps, if outside governments feel the
pressure, a long awaited freedom.
In this parched, waiting part of the Sahara,
cinema is not only a way to get the peoples‟
story out, but to make sure that that story
does the Saharawi justice. In the past two
decades, over thirty documentary films, ranging
from the short to the feature length, have
emerged about various aspects of Saharawi
politics, hardships, culture, and day-to-day life.
Filmmakers from Spain, England, the United
States, New Zealand, France, Sweden, Norway,
Mexico, and several other countries, have
recorded real-life stories in the area; film titles
range from the more conflict related Blood and
Sand: War in the Sahara and The Berm:
Hidden Dangers to the culture infused Beat of
Distant Hearts: The Art Revolution in Western
Sahara, The Cubarawi Women and Sahara
Marathon.
Because the impact of visual images is
often initially stronger, or at least more
universal, than words, there is little denying
that film can be ―a vehicle for trying to
understand the international political
community‘s most vexing dilemmas‖ (Turan
9). And while films about the Saharawis and
their distress are essential in getting the
Saharawi cause out to the world, films by the
Saharawis guarantee that outgoing reports and
messages are spoken from a Saharawi
perspective, in a true Saharawi voice.
Completed films can offer more than a record
of present and past history—they also yield a
documentation of culture and identity.
Beyond simply carting in Jeep-loads of
films for projection, the FISAHARA offers
weeklong workshops in conjunction with the
festival. At the 2009 event, workshops topics
included Editing, Cinematography, Sound,
Documentary Filmmaking, Photography (―I
Am a Refugee,‖) Digital Postcards, Animation
for Children (―Stories of Sand and Stone,‖)
Documentary Filmmaking for Children (―A
Window Open to Reality,‖) Short Fiction
Filmmaking for Children, Radio, and ―A
Celebration of Motherhood—Mothers‘
Experiences and Stories.‖ Though workshops
have varied slightly over the FISAHARA‘s six
years of operation, adults, teens and children
have been able to learn and even hone basic
filmmaking techniques through a variety of
professional-led sessions.
Journalist Samuel Loewenberg
recalls his workshop experience at the 2004
Sahara Festival:
―The cinematographer Jordi Abusada
was one of the most popular teachers,
with his class for teenagers. He shot
the award-winning film Mondays in
the Sun, starring Javier Bardem. For
six hours a day Abusada demonstrated
the basics of how to use a camera to a
rapt audience. He took the kids out to
practise their newfound talents,
making short documentaries about
their lives.‖ (Loewenberg in Times)
Indeed, the wonder of such workshops is that
they facilitate just the sort of self-expression
and disclosure of a refugee situation that the
Saharawis could use. Instead of settling for
visual documents created by an outsider, with
workshop-taught tools, Saharawi men, women
and children can, and do, create their own
testimonies.
In her ―Digital Postcards‖ workshop,
Isabel Santaolalla met with a dozen young
Saharawi women to help them create one-
minute video messages about their lives. The
finished (extremely short) films were shared not
only by the women with each other, but also
posted online for women around the world to
view and respond to with their own video clips.
According to art therapist Shaun McNiff, ―[t]he
basic emotional response that most of us have
when engaged with videotape is the feeling that
we will be ―seen‖ by others and by ourselves‖
(McNiff 244). It makes perfect sense, then, that
video and film are becoming important forms
of expression in these inhospitable desert
camps.
Whether the goal is to broadcast a
hidden truth to the rest of the world, send a
memo to a nearby camp, or show-off a finished
product to a fellow refugee, the documentary
images of
films made in,
about and by
the Sahara
hold great
value.
Because
visual art—
and in this
case hand-
held camera
art—is ―not a
linear process
and need not
obey the rules
of language,
such as
syntax, grammar, logic, and correct spelling, it
can express many complexities simultaneously‖
(Malchiodi 12). Thus, for budding Saharawi
filmmakers, language barriers can be the last
point of concern, and more important things,
like human rights, visibility and freedom can be
the first.
Beyond articulating the political woes of a
disenfranchised nation, cinema gives a much
needed voice to some of Saharawi society‟s
often muted members—the women. While
Saharawi females are well educated and
encouraged to participate in both the nation‘s
politics and cultural posts—the current
Saharawi Minister of Culture is a woman—
many are still hesitant to express themselves
openly in the presence of men. According to
Western Sahara historian Biancamaria Scarcia
Amoretti, while some literature about the
Saharawi indicates ―the possible existence in
some groups of an ancient matriarchy, or a
freedom of initiative in marriage or divorce‖ a
much more widespread literature presents the
―Saharawi social structure as that of an ordinary
patriarchal and hierarchical society‖ (Amoretti
187).
More than thirty years of waiting, of
which nearly twenty were spent at war, have
entrusted women with extraordinary challenges
and a series of non-traditional responsibilities.
Whereas the Saharawi woman has always run
the home/tent—from erecting and dismantling
as well as furnishing and upkeeping the
structure, to planning how food and resources
should best be put to use—and has long been
―the privileged trustee of a specific cultural
tradition‖ (Amoretti 188), the altered situation
of war and exile ―has pressed women into
taking part in public life‖ (Amoretti 186).
While Saharawi men have been engaged in
wartime activities, many of the women have
single-handedly raised children and efficiently
run civil society by leading women‘s unions
and collectives, worker‘s unions, and students‘
associations, as well as by representing the
Polisario Front at various associations and
women‘s groups (Lippert 162).
Amoretti suggests that any future
reconstruction of a Saharawi nation and country
depends on the Saharawi women:
―In effect then, it is the duty of the
Saharawi women to turn the ‗refugee‘
situation into an experience which will
help pave the way for the introduction
of an efficient, effective and modern
way of life. In the same way, it is the
Saharawi women‘s duty to use the
circumstances created by the war to
build a people, a nation and a state.‖
(Amoretti 190)
Considering that such responsibilities have
fallen into the hands of the female half of
Saharawi society it is startling, and stunting to
that society, that these women do not have a
confident voice.
Through its numerous workshops, many
of which are now women-only, the FISAHARA
enables girls and women to get their messages
out, and to not feel intimidated or embarrassed
in doing so. ―In its simplest sense, art making is
an activity that can generate self-esteem,
encourage risk taking and experimentation,
teach new skills, and enrich one‘s life‖ (14)
affirms art therapist Cathy A. Malchiodi in The
Art Therapy Sourcebook. Indeed, at the 2009 ―I
Am a Refugee‖ Photography Workshop for
children, girls were initially far more timid,
while boys took greater risks with subject
matter, camera angles and the quantity of shots
taken. After a few days of instruction and
encouragement in gender-separate groups, most
girls began to experiment with the visual art
form and to take control of the camera without
their former indications of shyness or restraint.
Similarly, Sandblast founder Danielle
Smith remembers her own keenness to work
with the Saharawi women—who in the eyes of
many, ―run the whole show anyway,‖—after an
initial trip to the camps in 1991. The first
workshop that Smith led in the area included
both male and female participants and the
response was extremely positive. Yet Smith
found that the Saharawi women had a difficult
time expressing themselves, both creatively and
otherwise, in the presence of men. To the
outrage of the males, Smith brought back the
workshop the following year as a women-only
endeavour, a model which has proved ―a huge
success‖ year after year.
In its sixth year, the Sahara Film
Festival brought with it several workshops
restricted to girls and women alone. Isabel
Santaolalla‘s ―Digital Postcards‖ workshop,
now two years in the running, was founded
when Santaolalla realized that ―very few
people—certainly not my students—very few
people knew about the reality of the Saharawi
people.‖
―I wanted my students to hear it from
you,‖ emphasized Santaolalla as she taught her
group of eager female pupils how to record
short messages on a set of FLIP video cameras.
The messages have since been posted on the
Just Messaging/Mensaje Justo website, in an
attempt to ―facilitate the circulation of
messages created in three different locations:
the UK, Spain and Saharawi camps in Western
Algeria‖ (Just Messaging). Chances are, these
women will not stop at Digital Postcards
alone—several left the workshop speaking of
ideas for films that they would like to make in
the future, films about the lives of Saharawi
women. If the lives and voices of such
Saharawi women can reach the outside world,
then perhaps so can the cause of the Western
Saharan nation which they stand behind and
continue to build.
A VIABLE FUTURE FOR THE NEW
GENERATIONS: CINEMA AS AN
EDUCATIONAL TOOL However, six years ago, friends of our community
opened a new window of solidarity, reflected in
the initiative of a film festival held in the Sahrawi
refugee camps […] This idea has represented for
the Sahrawis an extraordinary human experience
[…] This novel event invites all Sahrawi refugees,
whatever their judgement may be, to recognize
the importance of this art and accept one another,
their customs and ways of life.
–Khadija Hamdi, Saharawi Minister of Culture
In a population desperately short of basic skills,
those who have relevant experience are in a key
position to teach others.
–James Firebrace, ―The Saharawi Refugees:
Lessons and Prospects‖
Film is increasingly viewed as a development
tool, not just for Saharawis, but for displaced
people everywhere.
–Beatrice Newbery, Journalist
Educating the viewers may not be at the top
of the Sahara International Film Festival‟s
To-Do list, yet year after year the dusty
desert gathering equips both Saharawi and
visitors with a plethora of vital lessons. With
its films, roundtables and workshops, the
FISAHARA opens a window to the world,
through which those unfamiliar with Saharawi
culture and post-exile resilience can look in,
and those unaware of a diverse water-laden
world beyond the stretch of sands, can look out.
The weeklong festivities provide grounds on
which to ―de-other‖ the ―other‖ and to best
prepare a nation for a double-scenario—either
an extended existence in the Algerian desert, or
the freeing of Western Sahara and a long
awaited independence.
Since the initial Saharawi exodus in
1975, the Polisario Front has championed both
health (preventative medicine and care for the
ill) and education—Article Seven of the
‗fundamental principles‘ section of the SADR
(Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic)
constitution reads, ―Education, health and
social protection are rights guaranteed to all
citizens‖ (Lippert 159).
Under the Polisario‘s guiding hand,
literacy rates have soared from only five
percent during Spanish colonization to over
ninety-five percent for both men and women. In
the camps, the Polisario have opened schools
for children and women—children and women
comprise eighty percent of the current Saharawi
population—and have sent brighter students
abroad, mainly overseas to Cuba, for both basic
schooling and a university education.
(Unfortunately foreign education has not come
without its problems: many Saharawi who
return home feel disconnected from their desert
origins, and find that the refugee camps, whose
few hospitals and institutions are already
overstaffed, have little use for their new
engineering and medicine degrees.)
In an attempt to ready its in-camp
population for eventual independence, the
Polisario has opened vocational schools which
teach future-oriented trades such as mechanics,
plumbers, electricians, masons, secretaries and
administrative assistants, radio and refrigerator
repairmen, designers, printers, and so on
(Lippert 162). Dye shops and sewing
workshops in women‘s schools produce the
colourful malfahs that the Saharawi women
wear, as well as the vibrant clothes to ornate
and patch up the haimas (tents). When
independence comes, the Western Saharans
―plan to be prepared with Saharawis trained to
manage every aspect of their [democratic]
state‖ (Lippert 160).
For the Saharawis, the FISAHARA
means a necessary boost in education and
awareness for those still relatively unfamiliar
with the outside world. Khadija Hamdi,
Saharawi Minister of Culture, addressed this
issue in the 2009 Festival Program welcome:
―The Saharawi refugees have lived for
more than three decades in a desert
environment where they experience
all kinds of suffering and in which
they have raised generations of youth
who‘ve grown up without any kind of
leisure or knowledge of a world
different from the one they inhabit.‖
(FiSAHARA09 Program 3)
Indeed, not only have most of the desert-raised
children never seen a river or an ocean, but
many have trouble conceptualizing a world that
includes countries beyond Western Sahara,
Morocco, Algeria, and Spain. Schoolhouses are
in desperate need of world maps—the only
visible one at this year‘s festival hung in a
dimmed
internet café,
though
rumours spoke
of another
map, hanging
upside-down
across a hole
in some mud-
hut toilet to
stop the
endless
Sirocco
breeze—and
children, at
least those
who have not
studied in Cuba, are prone to assuming that
Canada, England and other European countries,
are simply cities in Spain. If the Saharawi are to
govern their own country, then such a myopic
understanding of the world will prove
extremely detrimental.
Not only do many visitors to the
FISAHARA bring with them textbooks,
teaching supplies and visual aids, all of which
are in short supply, but their language, clothing,
mannerisms, and physical attributes tell of
foreign lands. (At this year‘s Sahara Festival, a
visitor with Asian features caused quite an
excitement with the young Saharawi boys and
girls.) Furthermore, an assortment of
international films conveys a sense of the
different customs and cultures that lie beyond
Saharan lands. ―Some Saharawis have never
seen a film on 35mm,‖ says Sarah Pujalte, the
festival‘s Spanish production coordinator. ―We
want to normalize life here, show them what
they would be doing if they lived in their own
country now. We choose films that will both
provoke debate and educate people who have
never traveled‖ (Pujalte in Newbery).
Because the majority of visitors and
films screened are still from Spain, Saharawi
adults and children get a much welcome
opportunity to practice speaking and reading
Spanish—a second language which is taught in
schools and allows the Saharawi to
communicate with their Spanish ex-colonizer
and with much of the outside world. The
FISAHARA has also helped trigger a variety of
exchange schemes and international programs
that ―are important for children living in such
isolation in order to broaden their
understanding‖ (Firebrace 177). As a result of
the festival, up to three hundred Saharawi youth
are invited to spend their summers in Spain
each year; their welcoming committee includes
non-other than Bardem, accompanied by the
likes of Miguel Ángel Silvestre, Julio Medem,
Lola Herrera and Rosa María Sardá. Sandblast,
the London-based arts organisation, is also
―working to provide longer-term cultural and
artistic opportunities for the Saharawis,
including month-long film and theatre
workshops, and artist exchange visits to
Europe‖ (Newbery).
As well as fostering a more global
outlook, the Sahara International Film Festival
has, in diverse ways, tackled matters of health
and health education. ―In some [refugee]
camps, film is used to put across messages—to
promote health, peace, and human rights, or to
warn against HIV/AIDS or gender violence‖
(Newbery), and while FISAHARA screens a
small number of films that perform such
functions, health in the camps is generally
enhanced by other means. Many of the
festival‘s foreign attendees cart in boxes and
luggage brimming with medical supplies—from
painkillers and antibiotics to disinfectants and
bandages—which are later distributed and
entrusted to town leaders, and those in direct
contact with the hospitals.
At the 2009 event, while others
marvelled at moving pictures under a starry
sky, a Saharawi translator, humanitarian
worker, women‘s cooperative leader and micro-
credit partisan by the name of Fariya, sorted
through boxes of the Western pills and potions
that had been delivered to her haima. A visiting
Spanish doctor explained and labelled the
individual packets, laying them out one by one
on the richly coloured carpet, ensuring that the
Saharawi woman could pass these medicines
and information about their use on to hospitals
and those in
need.
Chances are
that with
the film
festival
drawing in
increased
visitors—
this year, a
record of
nearly six
hundred
foreigners
flew in for
the
festivities—
offerings of
medicine will continue to sustain basic
Saharawi health care.
Even those that do not bring health
supplies can offer their own brand of valuable
lessons and observations. Because the desert
expanse is so vast and sanitation is limited,
many Saharawis fail to dispose of garbage
properly. Young and old casually throw plastic
bottles, broken pens, and ragged shoes into the
sands, assuming that the desert winds will
promptly sweep the scraps away. And though
much of this lingering waste is more unsightly
than harmless, items such as old batteries, when
improperly disposed of, release harmful acids
into the water wells, causing damage to
residents‘ bones and teeth. By packing away
their own garbage as they would in their home
countries, and teaching the Saharawi to do the
same, FISAHARA visitors can help the nation
to preserve its health and build sanitation
habits.
Yet perhaps the most obvious sort of
educating that occurs through the Sahara Film
Festival is the technical and artistic training that
men and women, adults and children, receive at
FISAHARA workshops. From cinema and
photography to jewellery making and music
recording, these educational sessions strengthen
hope for the future: ―[t]he focus on projects for
education and technical training for all
Saharawis, the experience of working together
as equals, the training provided in self-
management and self-expression, are all part of
their nation-building‖ (Lippert 163).
And where art-making has
traditionally been a personal expression rather
than a financial endeavour—many artists and
art therapists agree that ―art is a way of life, not
a way to make a living‖ (Nadeau 62)—training
in cinema and other artistic crafts could bring
monetary gain to this marginalized region of
the Sahara. Not only does festival tourism draw
money into the ―Saharawi economy‖ by
providing drivers, tourist shops, town eateries,
and haimas with a week‘s worth of work and
pay, but the technical skills that the Saharawis
acquire through festival workshops can pay off
financially and politically. Saharawi musical
recordings, visual art and jewellery have been
sold both at home and abroad, and have sent
silenced traces of Saharawi culture out into the
world. As for Saharawi filmmaking—the will
and inspiration are already present. If the
technical skill and equipment can match it, then
Saharawi national cinema too has the potential
to one day turn a profit.
As with the ―Third Cinema‖ and
―Aesthetic of Hunger‖ film movements of the
1960s and 1970s—movements which emerged
―from the Cuban revolution, from Peronism and
Peron‘s ―third way‖ in Argentina, and from
such movements as Cinema Novo in Brazil‖
(Stam 99)—the Saharawis have the opportunity
to use their oppression, desolation, and
minimalist reality as important cinematic tools.
With ―Third Cinema,‖ the idea was ―to turn
strategic weakness—the lack of infrastructure,
funds, equipment—into tactical strength,
turning poverty into a badge of honour […]‖
(Stam 100-101). Whether the Saharawis choose
to zoom-in on their dire situation or to
showcase their unique culture and
determination to survive, the end effect will be
a document, voice and testament to the
existence and tenacity of this forgotten desert
people.
In the ―desert of deserts‖ cinema is
perhaps as much of an educator to short-stay
visitors as it is to the 200,000 permanent
residents. The Sahara International Film
Festival offers foreigners an opportunity to
learn about the marginalized ―other,‖ and to
dispel any notions they may have had about the
Saharawi camps and the people that inhabit
them. Through personal interactions—visitors
connect with their host families at the very
least—and onscreen depictions of the Sahara,
often filmed by emerging Saharawi filmmakers,
guests to the area become temporarily
immersed in refugee life.
What many find in place of presumed
chaos, desperate violence and malnourished,
bloated stomachs, is a society in which literacy,
culture and health-care are championed as the
building blocks of the future Saharawi society.
―We are very well,‖ said translator and
women‘s cooperative leader Fariya, at the 2009
festival. ―Compared with other camps, we are
doing very well.‖ Certainly, a mere week of
FISAHARA-style cultural celebrations,
displays of solidarity, educational workshops,
and cinema for all ages, is enough to suggest
that though material circumstances are
desperate, other, less tangible riches do abound
in this ―backyard of hell.‖
IN WITH THE OLD, IN WITH
THE NEW: CINEMA AS A
CULTURAL TOOL
Our country [Burkina Faso] is modest and
underdeveloped, and people used to say that
priority in development should be for agriculture
and other things. Now we understand that no
people can be developed without their own
culture, that showing our culture is a priority. If
you know yourself in terms of identity, you can
succeed.
–Filippe Sawadogo, Former Secretary General of
FESPACO
The help of international organizations has
always been limited to food, health and, in part,
education, without taking into account projects
and educational programs that would make the
Saharawis able to conserve their culture and to
learn of foreign cultures, by means of libraries
and cultural centers or through art of any kind.
–Khadija Hamdi, Saharawi Minister of Culture
Culture maintains identity and solidarity, which
allows nomadic groups to create and uphold a
particular, distinct identity.
–Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti,
―Women in the Western Sahara‖
An International Film Festival in a forgotten
corner of Algerian desert may be a relatively
new construct, but the burst of colour and
culture that resides therein is not. Since their
exodus from Western Sahara more than thirty
years ago, the Saharawi have been filling their
temporary patch of desert land with the sorts of
cultural displays that were forbidden them
under Moroccan rule. While they wait patiently
for independence, a social affairs committees
maintains the spirit of the refugees and
―provides other activities: music and dance,
both traditional and contemporary, dramatic
performances, story-telling, poetry recitals‖
(Lippert 161). And in the past six years a new
form of art—cinema—has entered the desert
sphere, not to quell the old forms of expression,
but to give them another reason to occur, and a
bigger audience to occur for.
The FISAHARA may be a film festival,
but both locals and visitors know that the film
part of the event is hardly as significant as the
actual festival. In the opinion of journalist
Beatrice Newbery, the FISAHARA‘s primary
focus is cultural exchange and exploration:
―Over the five days, debates and workshops run
in tandem with exhibitions, parades, concerts,
and camel races. All the artistic events are
filmed and played to an audience at the end‖
(Newbery). Since its inception, the Sahara Film
Festival has proved to be an enormous display
of identity and pride, and an opportunity for
everyone, from schoolchildren to Polisario
soldiers, to participate in the building of a
national consciousness.
While FISAHARA festivities aim to
unify the community—a community which has
become increasingly more fragmented as a new
Saharawi generation grows dissatisfied with life
in the desert, and many Cuban-educated youth
find it hard to call themselves Saharawis at
all—the presence of cameras and emphasis on
filmmaking ensures that traditions will be
recorded for both the outside world and future
Saharawi generations. The fact that this display
of ―forbidden Saharawi culture‖ so boldly
occurs in the backyard of the oppressive
Moroccan regime, is a political statement in and
of itself.
The human need for a culture-specific
artistic expression is evident to art therapist
Bernie Warner, who points out that ―the
individual creative output—the individual‘s
right and ability to state ‗I am here‘, ‗I am
unique‘—is a sign of a healthy individual‖
(Warren 3). Similarly, a society free to output
creative manifestations of culture is a thriving,
healthy society. For centuries, the non-literate
Saharawi people have relied on folklore—the
part of culture transmitted by word of mouth or
by custom and practice—to ―relate the history
and wisdom of a society; reinforce custom and
taboo; teach skills by example; explain the
mysteries of the universe and man‘s place
within it; amuse and entertain; offer solutions to
personal and practical problems‖ (Watling 24).
Traditional tales, proverbs, poems, dramas, and
crafts, as well as dances, music and ballads,
have acted as history books, etiquette manuals
and rough ―how-to‖ or ―how-not-to‖ guides to
life.
Yet Sandblast‘s Danielle Smith believes
that these days, ―there are a lot of things that
are undermining the arts and culture‖ in the
Saharawi community. Unfortunately, says
Smith, a lot has changed since she first visited
the camps in the early 1990s. Saharawi
aesthetics, memories and traditions are rapidly
disappearing due to a number of internal and
external factors: foreign influence in the area—
the Spanish and Algerian imprint is now joined
by the allure of the West—and a lack of
traditions being passed down are stunting
Saharawi culture and identity.
While Saharawi husbands fought at the
Moroccan frontlines, their wives struggled to
singlehandedly raise a new generation of
Western Saharans. Without father figures and
male elders to pass down certain teachings and
traditions, many have lost touch with Saharawi
values and have opted for their own version of
Western etiquette: teenaged boys cruise the
dusty camp roads in Land Rovers, sporting
knock-off designer jeans, studded belt-buckles,
skin-tight t-shirts, and hints of cologne and hair
gel; a chance encounter with a foreigner sparks
either an outburst of cat-calls or an attempt to
secure some alcohol, a drink strictly prohibited
in Islam and unavailable in the camps. The
behaviour of women, too, has changed in the
last few decades: many have developed
problems with attitude and respect, showing a
lack of the latter and a more obnoxious,
disobedient brand of the former.
For a smaller portion of the new
generation—the children and youth who leave
the Sahara for a multi-year Cuban education—
the Saharan identity becomes a figment of the
past, and often something more easily left
behind. Instead of gathering oral traditions and
methodologies from Saharawi elders, students
stay in their host countries, sometime
immersing themselves in Spanish or Cuban
cultures for over a decade, only to come back to
the Sahara and, in the words of Danielle Smith,
―feel like strangers within their own blood
family.‖ For those Saharawis who choose to
return home—and rumour has it that some stay
on in their host countries illegally, often
marrying while there—a severe lack of white
collar jobs in the camps, coupled with
memories of a more comfortable life elsewhere,
adds to the impatience and dissatisfaction that
many already feel for the current Saharawi
situation. Because the camps have little use for
the skills of its professionally trained citizens,
returning Saharawis are often idle and
disconnected, while their families feel that they
have lost their children to Cuba, for nothing.
Unfortunately, according to afrol
News/Futuro Sahara (―the only independent
news agency dedicated exclusively to Africa‖)
reporter Salek Saluh, the Saharawi regime ―is
unfit to offer employment to its youth and
really incapable of convincing them to stay
behind its lines - this unfortunately is the most
extended opinion among the majority today‖
(Saluh). In a recent survey conducted by Futuro
Saharaui hundreds of Saharawi refugees
between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five
disclosed their thoughts on foreign visas and
emigration: 470 out of the 540 youth
interviewed, an astounding eighty-seven
percent, said they desired a visa to a foreign
country to be able to emigrate. Many cited
reasons such as ―improved material standards,
access to medical treatment and even
availability of entertainment and plain fun‖
(Saluh). According to Saluh, the current visa
dream may warn of ―a disaster for an unstable
state, governing an estimated 200,000 refugees
in exile‖ (Saluh).
If the FISAHARA can in any way mend
the growing cultural rift, it must do so gently.
In order for film, a new form of visual art to the
Saharawi people, to serve as an expressive tool
rather than a modern obstruction, festival
organizers must keep in mind a sense of
history, of culture and of continuity. In his own
experience, art therapist Rob Watling has found
that ―we must insist that our modern-day
material takes a lesson from its traditional
counterpart […] creative therapy must work as
an expression, not as an imposition […]
folklore, the carrier of wisdom, faith, joy and
learning for thousands of years, has never
successfully been imposed on anyone‖
(Watling 32). Thus, the FISAHARA‘s hands-on
workshops offer men and women, youth and
elders, the opportunity to learn modern skills
that can be coupled with traditional art forms
and cultural customs in a bid to enhance and
preserve the Saharawi identity.
Because the larger part of Saharawi
history has been an illiterate one, artistic
traditions have been passed on orally and most
lack written record. Saharawi women pass on
the folk poetry ―which in Bedouin society
constitutes historical record since it is
composed of comment in the major aspects of
day-to-day life of the group‖ (Amoretti).
According to Amoretti, ―[t]he importance of
[poetry] composition on the political level and
in the process of national identity should not be
underestimated‖ (Amoretti 189). At the
FISAHARA, the mere recording of such poetry
and of other artistic traditions, such as dance
and song, on video ensures that the Saharawi
culture will live on, registered on a (film)
document for future generations. At the
―Digital Postcards‖ workshop, one which
blends the more
traditional
concept of
postcards with
modern video
technology,
Isabel
Santaolalla
insisted that the
women‘s
messages
needn‘t be
verbal at all.
―We want for
you to think:
what do you
want to say?‖ she explained, adding that
Saharawi songs, stories and images of the
family were just as good as the spoken word.
Besides recording cultural performances
on film and video and teaching locals to do the
same, the Sahara International Film Festival
works to bring the clashing older and younger
Saharawi generations together in a massive
display of solidarity and pride. According to
Anne Lippert, in the case of the Saharawi, ―the
focus of much of this creative activity, although
rooted in traditional forms, is the struggle for
independence […] In acting out or celebrating
[historical] events, the refugees come to grips
with their present history and sustain the
courage to continue the struggle‖ (Lippert 161).
At the festival, film is more than a moving
image on an improvised screen; it becomes a
way of participating and of asserting identity,
even of recovering that crucial sense of
purpose, of passion, that can easily get buried in
the old Saharan sands.
Though generations may not see eye-to-
eye on matters of Saharawi politics and culture,
both young and old welcome the FISAHARA
as a celebration with ―something in it for
everyone.‖ For Saharawi youth, the night-time
concert in the dunes as well as the more family-
friendly musical performance near the end of
the festival, are refreshing opportunities to
party, dance and simply have fun. (The often
political messages in the songs revive any
dormant nationalism.) Events like the camel
race, the Saharawi dance performances, the
Awards Ceremony, and the actual film
screenings themselves are widely enjoyed by
locals and visitors of all ages. ―The best thing
about the festival is the coming together of
people‖ a young Saharawi woman declared at
the 2009 event. ―I love the festival very much,
because there are a lot of people, there are
many things to do, there‘s music. Everybody
comes together. It‘s very cool.‖
With director Steven Soderbergh‘s two-
part CHE screening to a mammoth audience at
the 2009 festival, film may well have narrowed
the gap between another two factions within the
Saharawi society: the Saharawis and the
―Cubans.‖ Throughout the film, and well after,
unified cheers for Che Guevara rang through
the camps; eventually the film won the coveted
First Place prize—a living white camel.
Not only do the festival and its many
Spanish visitors serve as a temporary
occupation for the foreign-educated
―Cubans‖—if their professional skills are
unused, their knowledge of the world and
mastery of the Spanish language are much
needed, much appreciated at the FISAHARA—
but the often political messages of the films
work to re-develop a group and nationhood
consciousness. Revolutionary films, such as
CHE, become even more spectacular when
played mid-desert, to a largely disenfranchised
audience, on a giant screen attached to a semi
truck. For several hours, in an explosion of
sound, light and colossal onscreen figures,
Che‘s cause becomes the center of the world,
and those Saharawis that were once skeptical
feel the drive towards freedom once more.
The influx of visitors during the festival
week gives the Saharawi a reason to display
their culture and identity proudly. ―Mira!
Mira!‖ (Look! Look) is commonly heard from
those wanting to urgently show off a part of the
Sahara—whether a lazy camel, a brewing dust-
storm, a malfah, a friend‘s haima, a yellow
schoolhouse, or the burnt remains of a setting
sun. Often, locals are not fully satisfied with
their demonstrations until visitors have snapped
a photo of the ‗Saharan thing‘ in question. If
this sort of pride in all-things-Saharawi can live
on past the festival closing ceremonies—and
not fade into the self-pitying ―refugee role‖ that
many in the camps have only recently begun to
play and to take advantage of—then the
Saharawi nation may stay firm enough to see its
eventual freedom and revival. In the end, the
FISAHARA is all about the gathering: the
Saharawis come together because they have a
show to run, and hopefully, once the festival is
over, they stay together to run something much
bigger—a unique nation in a bid for its
freedom.
FILM FOR THE SAKE OF FILM:
CINEMA AS JUST PLAIN FUN The need to make art is a basic human urge, trait
of our species as natural as language, sex, social
interaction, and aggression.
–Cathy A. Malchiodi,
The Art Therapy Sourcebook
Nation building is not so serious that the
Saharawis can no longer laugh.
– Anne Lippert, ―The Saharawi refugees: origins
and organization, 1975-85‖
Seeing films also helped provide what was most
denied Sarajevo’s citizens, an ordinary feeling
unnoticed during peacetime, the sense of being
simply normal.
–Kenneth Turan, Film Critic
Its functions may range from the cultural to
the political, but during the festival week, the
FISAHARA is all about entertainment. For
the thousands of Saharawis who have lived
more than thirty years as exiles in the Algerian
desert, film is a way to normalize life. Whether
the refugees enjoy the mere sights and sounds
of the big screen, or further engross themselves
in filmmaking and film analysis, cinema
provides an opportunity for the ―forgotten
people‖ to, for a moment, forget the camps,
forget the Algerian desert, forget the fact that
they have been forgotten at all. ―If the Saharawi
seem glad to have finally received global
attention, they are perhaps more pleased about
the diversion of the Festival Week films
themselves,‖ writes journalist Samuel
Loewenberg. ―For many, this is one of less than
a handful of times that they have seen moving
pictures fill a movie screen‖ (Loewenberg).
The FISAHARA gives local desert
dwellers a chance to participate in the events
they choose, because they choose to do so:
children‘s classes are cut short to make room
for song and dance practices, sing-alongs, or
workshops; men ready camels for the
anticipated race through town; women leave
their tents in celebratory black malfahs to join
others in dance rehearsals; and vendors stock
and set up stalls around the open stretch of dust
that serves as the town square. Handicapped
Saharawis, who in the past were sent away
from their families for better care abroad, now
actively participate in the festivities and art-
making. Even visitors to the festival arrive with
groups of friends and an ongoing chatter.
Despite its obvious quirks, many treat the
FISAHARA as they would any other social
event; some film-buffs even claim to have
come purely for the film festival.
For a week every year, Saharawis can
enjoy cinema for the sake of cinema, and with
it, the simple act of coming together. Ask any
Saharawi if they find the FISAHARA‘s brand
of cultural tourism disturbing or in the least bit
irritating, and they give you a puzzled look. So
much is happening, they declare, how could it
bother anyone? While Americans ―create the
world‘s most popular films but look on the
medium as a weekend diversion that can easily
be done without‖ (Turan 104), the Saharawis
are grateful for, and cognisant of, every minute
spent in front of the screen. In her 2009 festival
welcome, Minister of Culture Khadija Hamdi
acknowledges what can only be described as
true movie magic:
This idea has represented for the
Sahrawis an extraordinary human
experience, fruit of the work of
writers, directors, and artists who,
through the large or small screen,
transfer styles and forms of life with
all they can transmit of happiness,
sorrow, hopes, love, and hate.
(FiSAHARA09 program 3)
For a population sealed away in the middle of
the desert, the many different lives and worlds
in these films revive feelings of potential and of
a larger human connection.
For Saharawis like Mohammad—a
young man who, earlier this year, lost a leg to
the heavily mined berm—and for those who
still remember the horrors of exodus, film and
filmmaking may provide much needed healing
after the traumatic events. Art Therapist Cathy
A. Malchodi employs the arts in mental health,
rehabilitation and special educational settings,
with children, adolescents and adults whose
specific needs have identified them as being
outside of normal society. Unquestionably, the
Saharawi are both physically and politically on
the outside. And because ―trauma often
encompasses powerful visual images through
memories, dreams, and flashbacks, art is an
appropriate means of expressing it‖ (Malchiodi
150). The non-verbal language of visual art,
with its colours, lines, and images (in this case,
ones which can even move,) speaks in ways
which words cannot. Thus, the creation of
visual art can promote insight, growth, healing,
and transformation.
Regardless of their situation, many
people find art making—with the FISAHARA
the focus is primarily on film and video—to be
soothing and stress reducing, a way to
transcend troubling circumstances, a means by
which to enhance and enrich daily life
(Malchiodi XIII). The artistic and technical
skills that the Saharawi refugees develop during
festival workshops, as well as their intrinsic
sense of expression and imagination, remain
long after the screens and reels have been
packed away. ―For many people, being able to
contain their ideas, experiences, and emotions
in art can have a positive effect,‖ writes
Malchiodi. ―For others, talking about what they
have portrayed in their images, particularly
traumatic experiences or feelings, is cathartic‖
(Malchiodi 13).
For the majority of the Saharawi
population, who may not be suffering from
trauma, but are still finding their sequestered
life in the ―backyard of hell‖ a bit much handle,
the process of art making and viewing ―can also
alleviate emotional stress and anxiety by
creating a psychological response of relaxation
or by altering mood‖ (Malchiodi 13). It is now
known that creative activity can actually
increase brain levels of serotonin—a chemical
whose depletion is linked to depression. If art
can add cheer and purpose to the daily lives of
the Saharawis who are growing restless in their
all-too permanent desert homes, then perhaps
emigration and adolescent discontent can be
eliminated from a longer list of problems.
Similarly, art can be used as a safe, free and
spontaneous outlet for the thousands of
Polisario soldiers who want nothing more than
to return to war. (Many people in the camps
disclose that a great majority of men would take
up arms against Morocco tomorrow, if the
United Nations would only allow it.)
For those who don‘t actively participate
in the workshops, the FISAHARA still proves a
welcome diversion. The festival‘s influx of
stars, screens, digital cameras, and camcorders,
opens the window to a world beyond that
barren sweep of winds and dusts. Whether the
ultimate payoff is political, educational,
cultural, or simply a matter of personal
enjoyment, the Sahara Film Festival appears to
be a worthwhile investment. In the words of art
therapist Rob Watling, ―even the simple act of
being a member of an audience can be calming
and nearly everyone loves to be told a story‖
(31). For many Saharawis, the biggest reward is
the feeling of normalcy, and a week‘s worth of
just plain fun.
MORE FILM FOR REFUGEES:
FISAHARA‟S COUNTERPARTS
Film brings hope and information
to fill the void.
–Beatrice Newberry, journalist
For those who have suffered human catastrophe
and lost almost everything, the capacity to
imagine a better future is essential for mental
well-being. Movies can provide a way to escape a
narrow, painful daily existence.
–Sarah Sheldon,
Doctors of the World
The Sahara International Film Festival is by
no means the first festival to use cinema as a
diversion and aid for marginalized people. The fact that other such film events and
festivals—what film festival-trotter Kevin
Turan calls ―festivals with geo-political
agendas‖ (Turan)—exist and have even been
known to thrive, suggests that there is demand
for them and that some primary needs are being
filled. According to Creative Arts Therapist
Bernie Warren, the concept of creative therapy
―is based on the timeless and everchanging
relationship between culture, artistic activity
and social development. It is perhaps redundant
to suggest that the arts and society are
inextricably linked and that the health of a
society is reflected in the pool of the artistic
activity the society posses—and vice versa‖
(Warren 3).
While the Saharawi develop their
relatively new festival, in nearby Burkina
Faso—a region called ―desperately, and
famously, poor‖ by one guidebook, ―not near
the top of anyone‘s short list of travel
destinations‖ by another‖ (Turan 66)—the Pan-
African Festival of Film and Television of
Ouagadougou (FESCPACO) has been showing
strictly African films since 1969. Like with the
FISAHARA, this festival has become the
national pride and display of culture of a
striving country. Critics and journalists fly in
from Tokyo, Romania, Brazil, and around the
world to take in films, festivities and even
commemorative FESPACO items such as
clothing and postage stamps.
In Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the
ten day Sarajevo Film Festival of 1993,
screened in the midst of a forty-six month
period of shelling and sniping from around
Serb-controlled hills, turned out to be, like the
FISAHARA, ―a lively and exhilarating event, a
miraculous breath of refreshing air experienced
against over-whelming odds‖ (Turan 91). While
in the far West, Americans looked on films as
an ordinary weekend diversion, Sarajevo
spectators risked their lives simply to make it to
the screenings. Film director Bato Cengic
remembers his own fears during the Bosnian
war:
Hunger is not the worst thing that can
happen to a person. As for death, I
was ignoring it. If grenades went off, I
didn‘t turn around. I was superior
compared to death. But what made me
unhappy and sad was that I didn‘t
have communication with the
civilized world. That was the worst
part. (Cengic in Turan 104)
For those living through the Bosnian War, as
for the Saharawi currently in the midst of their
own struggle, the fear of isolation and of being
forgotten has become a constant anxiety,
though one which can be and has been
alleviated through cinema.
Today, organizations like FilmAid,
whose slogan reads ―projecting hope and
changing lives through the power of film‖
(FilmAid), have also become proponents of
using ―the power of film and video to reach the
world‘s most vulnerable communities with
messages that inspire them, address their
critical shared needs, and effect social change‖
(Filmmaid.) In 1999, the organization ran eight
weeks of screenings in the refugee camps in
Macedonia and in the war-torn communities of
Kosovo; in April of 2006, FilmAid collaborated
with Listen Up! to provide a program for
America‘s Hurricane Katrina evacuees; and in
September 2009 FilmAid completed a three
month pilot project in Thailand, which is host
to approximately 150,000 registered refugees
living along its western border with Burma
(FilmAid).
Currently, FilmAid runs programs in the
Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps in Western
and Eastern Kenya, respectively. Though these
events are not international film festivals, the
programs there are similar to those at the
FISAHARA, and include film-based
informational workshops, outdoor evening
screenings, and community-based film
production. FilmAid‘s goals are also eerily on
mark with those of the Saharan Festival: to
bring marginalized individuals psychological
relief, knowledge, skills, and a greater sense of
purpose and focus, as well as to ―offer
individuals, communities and refugees a
broader view of the world, an opportunity to
imagine other futures for themselves and a
vision for how they can make a difference in
their communities‖ (FilmAid). It seems that the
feats cinema can accomplish on the screen may
yet be rivalled by the work it can do off-screen.
FROM MIRAGE TO REALITY:
WHAT LIES AHEAD FOR
„AFRICA‟S LAST COLONY‟
At the festivals the issues of nationality or
political relations are negotiated, economic
sustainability or profitability is realized, and new
practices of cinephilia are initiated. […] [Film
festivals] accommodate culture and commerce,
experimentation and entertainment, geopolitical
interests and global funding.
–Marijke de Valck, ―Film festivals: from
European geopolitics to global cinephilia‖
Pure art is important for personal development,
but they say that a document changes the world.
Therefore, we must make documents, and we must
make them well. –Agnieszka Bielecka, VI
FISAHARA volunteer
At a certain point, it has to be that you’re this
country and not a former colony.
–Daniella DeVito,
Crucible Centre, Roehampton University
Only a few decades ago, the vision of
incandescent outdoor screens rising from
that flat Saharan khaki would have been
more of a desert apparition than a yearly
reality. Yet today, for a week every spring,
refugees young and old prepare a colourful
cultural extravaganza and bus-loads of visitors
brave the forty-degree heat, with a couple of
common goals: to provide visibility for one of
the world‘s forgotten human rights issues, and
to sit back and watch some fantastic films. It
may have dusty dunes in place of red carpets,
pull-down screens instead of large venues with
well-lit aisles and popcorn vendors, and a
living, breathing, spitting camel as its version
of a first place trophy, but the FISAHARA is
not entirely unlike any other film festival. Like
elsewhere, Sahara Film Festival audiences still
enjoy the feelings of commotion, of
anticipation, of being at the center of the
universe, and films still earn a burst of applause
at the end.
Without a doubt, the festival is more of
a happening, a reason to gather, than a high-
profile cinematic event. The outdoor screens,
sweating stars and exotic reels, are as much a
serious film gala as they are a pitch to sell
human rights concerns under the guise of
cinema. ―Our army is prepared for war,‖
explained a middle aged Saharawi man at the
2009 festival, ―but before this happens, we are
petitioning the whole world.‖ Surely, the most
effective way to get the plight of the Saharawi
refugees acknowledged is to generate the
quantity and quality of ‗buzz‘ that can break
through desert boundaries, into the outside
world. Though as of yet the festival and its
effects are relatively small-scale, justice may
soon find a forgotten nation if this local festival
can push itself onto the global radar.
Fortunately, together with the
FISAHARA, several non-governmental
organizations, support networks and influential
figures have made the ignored Saharawi nation
a priority. Since 2005, Sandblast, the arts and
human rights charity founded by Danielle
Smith, has been organizing creative workshops
in the camps in order to ―facilitate
cultural/artistic expression and development,
and help develop collaborations between
Saharawis and artists worldwide‖ (Sandblast).
Projects in the camps in 2009 included an
introductory acting and film class, a master
workshop with semi-professional musicians and
a three-week workshop in jewellery design
from plastic bottles. In 2010, Sandblast hopes
to set up of a professional mobile (nomadic)
recording studio in the camps and to train
Saharawis to run it, an endeavour for which the
organization is looking to raise £50,000.
Sandblast‘s Saharawi Artist Fund
(SAF,) established to help finance the creative
workshops, has been collecting money in its
own imaginative ways: besides simply asking
for donations, this past Christmas Sandblast had
a variety of gift suggestions—―Let your friends
and family know about your dedication for the
Western Sahara cause and give Saharawi
jewellery, poetry, and artwork for Christmas‖
(Sandblast). The annual Running the
Sahara/Saharamarathon, comprised of 5km,
10km, half, and full marathon races, gives
participants the opportunity to travel to Algeria,
live with a Saharawi family and raise money for
the SAF. Last year—its ninth annual—the
Saharamarathon hosted 350 runners from
Europe, the United States and Algeria; the
twenty-two racers from Britain contributed
£10,000.
The Free Western Sahara Network
(FWSN)—a brain-child of Stefan Simanowitz,
set up after his virgin trip to the FISAHARA in
2009—is Sandblast‘s more political
counterpart. The online network aims to link
Western Sahara campaigners around the world
and regularly holds campaign meetings, sends
delegations to Downing Street (the United
Kingdom‘s Prime Minister‘s Office) and makes
the latest Sahara related articles readily
accessible on its website. The FWSN‘s intents
are similar to those of the FISAHARA—―We
need to move the story out of the film/culture
sections of a few newspapers and onto the
international pages of them all‖ (Free
Sahara)—yet unlike the FISAHARA, the
Network is adamant in mounting pressure on
decision-makers worldwide, and not only those
in Spain.
The FWSN is hardly shy in asking for
help, if that‘s what it takes to free the Sahara:
actors (A-C listers only) are urged to lend their
celebrity, ―philanthropic millionaires‖ their
funds, journalists their words, and the rest of us
our potential skills, our word of mouth and
social networks, and even our presence at the
upcoming FISAHARA (Free Sahara). In
partnership with the charity Caravanserai, the
FWSN has even organized a direct flight from
London to the desert, to fly non-Spanish
visitors to the Sahara Film Festival in 2010.
The goal is to make the isolated festival an
increasingly more international event.
Unfortunately, when it comes to hosting
cinema festivals and up-keeping their after-
effects in a scarcely reachable slab of desert,
skills and good-intent must be matched by
funds and technology. Organizations such as
FilmAid, which runs cinema screenings and
workshops for displaced peoples around the
world, know that money, used film equipment
and film stock are key in bringing film to the
forgotten. In order to raise the funds and
supplies needed for refugees to marvel at
screens or to work behind the camera, FilmAid
hosts galas, benefits and a World Refugee Day
event, and screens informative commercials at
bigger festivals such as Tribeca and Cannes.
If the Saharawi are to maintain the skills
taught them both at the FISAHARA and in
their own cooperatives and collectives, they
will need to draw in generous donations of
technology and equipment. Currently, while the
camps benefit from shipments of refurbished
computers and machinery from Spain, many of
the prehistoric models arrive in pieces due to
both their age and the bumpy desert roads they
must travel to get there. The availability of
cinematic and technical equipment in the area
will be crucial in developing a Saharawi
national voice and self-reliance; it will be no
less than a necessity if the Saharawi ever wish
to run the FISAHARA for themselves, rather
than having their ex-colonisers to manage it for
them.
These days, a variety of international
organizations are helping to meet the needs of
‗Africa‘s last colony.‘ Countries from around
the world, including Canada, the United States,
nations from the European Union, and even
Japan are helping to alleviate nutritional voids
by donating through the World Food
Programme. Algeria has, since the conflict
beginnings, been instrumental in the provision
of foods, supplies, transport, and even passports
to the Saharawi that dwell silently in its western
corner. Around the world, Refugee Studies
programs, degrees and centres are becoming
more visible—Roehampton University, in
London, has the first program of its kind, and
offers mandatory courses such as ―Questioning
Citizenship.‖ Art initiatives, such as Sandblast,
are joined by other groups and individuals that
host workshops in the desert and invite
Saharawi artists back to their own countries.
Yet more can always be done. Both
Saharawi artists and their sorely unexposed
nation could profit from tutorials,
collaborations and exchanges with filmmakers,
photographers, musicians, painters, dance
groups, and artisans from abroad. Food stuffs,
medical supplies and educational materials
must be brought into the camps; a
documentation of cultural richness and material
poverty must be carried out.
For the past six years, the Sahara
International Film Festival has been paving the
way to a long awaited Saharawi exposure. The
FISAHARA may be growing, but it still relies
largely on volunteers to conduct its week of
desert celebrations: artists are urged to host
workshops, journalists invited to send out
forgotten truths, international stars asked to
lend their faces and fame, and culture-trackers
and cinephiles welcome to rid themselves of
any pre-conceived notions they may have about
refugee life in the ―backyard of hell.‖
This coming year, the seventh annual
Sahara International Film Festival will take
place from 26 April to 1 May, with chartered
flights leaving both Madrid and London to the
Tindouf military airport in Algeria. For those
looking to partake in the film extravaganza that
is rumoured to be ―more of a happening than a
festival‖ (Newbery), the trip—from Madrid
through a cinematic experience in the bowels of
the desert and back—is priced at 650 Euro per
person. The experience is as far removed from
Cannes as they get; and for that very reason, it
may well be worth the visit. While other film
festivals display a variety of red carpet rituals
and symbolic acts ―that contribute to the
cultural positioning of films and filmmakers in
the film world‖ (de Valck 37), the FISAHARA
strives to contribute to the cultural positioning
of the forgotten Saharawi people in the real
world.
Not surprisingly, many FISAHARA
visitors find themselves retuning to the festival
over and over again. Once you‘ve been there,
it‘s not easy to forget the middle of the desert of
deserts. It‘s harder still to overlook the
burgeoning oral stories, group dances, national
songs, and the colourful haimas (tents) and
malfas (robes) that break the surface of that
chapped Saharan beige. Once a year, the
FISAHARA brings in international films, stars,
visitors and highly welcome media attention to
this waiting, forgotten people. Ultimately
though, it‘s not about what plays on the screen
or sits on a memory card in your digital camera,
waiting to be developed. It‘s about coming
together to celebrate a nation and to speak for
its cause. It‘s about putting a group of dusty
refugee camps on the world stage so that
people, like Ibrahim—a middle aged Saharawi
father—can finally get their points across:
―We are not stupid; we are smart
people, sharp people. Us, we are not Algeria,
we are not Mauritania, we are not Morocco. We
are Saharawi, we are different.‖
Works Cited and Consulted
Amoretti, Biancamaria Scarcia. ―Women in the
Western Sahara.‖ War and Refugees: The
Western Sahara Conflict. Richard
Lawless and Laila Monahan, eds.
London: Pinter Publishers, 1987. 187-
193.
―Closure of the 2nd International Festival of the
Cinema in Aousserd.‖ Sahara Presse
Service 6 March 2005. < http://www.
spsrasd.info/sps-e060305.html>
Culshaw, Peter. ―Sahara Film Festival: desert
blues.‖ Telegraph 30 May 2008.
< http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture
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Film-Festival-desert-blues.html>
De Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From
European Geopolitics to Global
Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2007.
FilmAid International. Official Website. 14 Dec
2009 < http://filmaid.org/>
Firebrace, James. ―The Saharawi refugees:
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Refugees: The Western Sahara Conflict.
Richard Lawless and Laila Monahan, eds.
London: Pinter Publishers, 1987. 167-
185.
FiSAHARA: Festival Internacional de Cine del
Sahara. Official website. 18 December
2009. http://www.festivalsahara.com/
FiSAHARA09 Program. VI Sahara International
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Free Western Sahara Network: A campaign to
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Official Website. Jan 1 2010.
<http://freesahara.ning.com/>
Just Messaging / Mensaje Justo: Three-Way
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<www.justmessaging.com>
Laverty, Paul. ―First International Sahara Film
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Lippert, Anne. ―The Saharawi refugees: origins
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Richard Lawless and Laila Monahan, eds.
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Loewenberg, Samuel. ―And the winner of the
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Loewenberg, Samuel. ―Boogie Desert Nights.‖
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Malchiodi, Cathy A. The Art Therapy
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McNiff, Shaun. Art Heals: How Creativity Cures
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Saluh, Salek. ―87% of young Saharawis want to
emigrate.‖ afrol News/ Futuro Saharaui
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Sandblast. 2008. Official Website. Dec 30 2009.
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Simanowitz, Stefan. ―Screening in the Devil‘s
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Smith, Teresa K. ―Al-Mukhtufin (the
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Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction.
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Thorne, John. ―Saharawi refugees form a
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Turan, Kenneth. Sundance to Sarajevo: Film
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Warren, Bernie. ―Introduction.‖ Using the
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Watling, Rob. ―Folklore/Ritual as a Basis for
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