Translation
The Runner (Film)
Saeen Taji Farouky
Tourist with a Typewriter
The Runner is a film directed by Saeed Taji Farouky, It’s a film about endurance. It is the story of a champion long-distance runner whose journey transformed him from an athlete into the symbol of a national liberation movement. Salah Hmatou Ameidan is willing to risk his life, his career, his family and his nationality to run for a country that doesn’t exist. He is from Western Sahara, officially Africa’s last colony and under Moroccan occupation since 1975.
Translation: Hassanya to English
Just to Let You Know That I am Alive (Film)
Emanuela Zuccalà
Zona, Sos Femmes en Détresse
Just to Let You Know That I’m Alive gives a voice to the women of the Sahrawi people, who have been subjected to some of the most severe and under-reported human rights abuses in the last thirty years. Degja Lachgare was taken from her home in 1980 and shuttled between prisons for eleven years, most of which she spent blindfolded. Soukaina Jid Ahloud spent nearly a decade of her life naked in a cell, where she watched her daughter die of starvation. Spending time with them in their houses and tents in the desert, director Emanuela Zuccalà was astonished by a rare peculiarity of these women: being able to speak about the terrible nightmares they have lived always preserving serenity in their eyes and a sincere hope in a better future.
Translation: Hassanya to English
Hamada (Film)
Eloy Domínguez Serén
Momentofilm
With vitality, humor and unexpected situations, this film paints an unusual portrait of a group of young friends living in a refugee camp in the middle of the stony Saharan desert. A minefield and the second largest military wall in the world separates this group of friends from their homeland that they have only heard about in their parent’s stories. They are called the Sahrawis and have been abandoned in this refugee camp in the middle of a stony desert ever since Morocco drove them out of Western Sahara forty years ago. Trapped somewhere in between life and death, Sidahmed, Zaara and Taher refuse to be bothered by it. They spend their days fixing cars that can’t really take them anywhere, fighting for political change without response and together they use the power of creativity and play to denounce the reality around them and expand beyond the borders of the camp.
Transaltion: Hssanya to English
Western Sahara
A Deserted People
(Film)
Peadar King
RTÉ
A story of a deserted people and a testimony to human resilience.
Set in the searing heat of the refugee camps in the desert of Algeria and in the occupied Western Sahara, Western Sahara—A Deserted People tells the compelling and moving story of how the Sahrawi people’s lives have been framed by poverty and injustice over their 40-year-long displacement. First presented by RTÉ, this documentary illustrates an indifferent world, exposing the human consequences of global economic inequalities, a hostile political environment, and human rights violations.
Translation: Hassanya to English
THE LAST COLONY
(Film)
Christian Gropper
Arte & Gropperfilm
It is Africa’s last colony – and lies right on Europe’s doorstep: Western Sahara. In 1975, Morocco occupied Western Sahara – through a war that was also supported by Western countries. The indigenous Sahrawi people were driven out. Those who remained face reprisals, while those who fled live in Algerian refugee camps – with just 17 liters of water per day per refugee and no real prospects for the future. For more than four decades. How long can this continue? Is this the start of the next flashpoint in Northwest Africa?
Studio in the Sand
(Radio Documentary)
Robin Denselow
BBC
Foreign correspondent and music journalist Robin Denselow travels to the refugee camps of the Saharawi people in Algeria who were displaced from Western Sahara following land dispute war with Morocco.
The Saharawi have been living in the camps for over 20 years, with their young people knowing nothing except life in the camps, where there is little chance of employment or escape. The music of the Saharawi is not as well known as that of neighbouring Mali, but it is a powerful expression of their culture and their desire to return home to the land from which they were displaced, a land whose landscapes and animals many younger Saharawi have never seen and can only dream about in the lyrics and chords of their music. The Saharawi are Muslim, but unlike in other parts of the region, here the women play a lead role in politics and music.
Robin speaks to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Culture in the camps about the forgotten struggle of the Saharawi whose plight has vanished off the international agenda, and about the role that their music plays to carry the story of their plight, as well as the haunting energy of their music, to an international audience.
Sandblast is a charity run by Danielle Smith and a group of British sound engineers who are setting up recording studios within the refugee camps in order to train musicians in how to produce recorded music, which can then be exported to an audience that would otherwise never get to hear its very particular note. Robin follows this initiative as the first trainees learn the ropes in the Studio in the Sand, speaking to trainers and new recruits and hearing electrifying first concerts.
Producer: Victoria Shepherd
A Somethin’ Else production for BBC Radio 4 first broadcast in 2013.
Translation: Hassanya to English