Stolen Documentary Asks for Your Definition of Slavery

One of the more controversial films at SIFF this year was Stolen, a Rashomon of a documentary by Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw that they say did not at all turn out the way they planned. The film details the hornet's nest the two stir up after "discovering" slavery in a Western Sahara refugee camp, a claim aggressively denied by their erstwhile hosts, the Polisario Front, and subsequently by their interviewees.

For North Americans, the film may turn out to be an eye-opening course in geopolitical history from the moment it begins, just as it was for the Australian (Fallshaw) and Bolivian (Ayala) filmmakers.

The documentary's impact (and limitations) stems from its presentation of the two walking into a decades-old North African conflict between Morocco and the Algerian-supported Polisario (a nationalist independence movement), involving Spain, France, and even Mauritania.

Somewhere between 80,000 and 160,000 people live in Algeria's Tindouf province, in refugee camps run by the Polisario, in precisely the conditions that you'd expect in the Sahara desert: lots of sand, no water, no vegetation. While they don't go hungry, adequate nutrition is a problem, and so is diabetes, according to Ayala.

But they also have cable TV, cars, and plenty of free time. Besides the functioning of the camps, there's little in the way of work there. The residents live in a political limbo, largely forgotten by everyone except the people who want them there, and the people who want them gone. "I feel like for everyone in the camps, their lives have been put on hold," Fallshaw told me.

Fallshaw and Ayala were initially following a human interest story that dealt with costs of the conflict: UN-sponsored family reunions that began in 2004 and allowed members of the camps short visits with relatives in Morocco, after 30 years of separation. Fallshaw explained that while the two were in Mauritania, filming the short documentary Between the Oil and the Deep Blue Sea, they spoke to a member of the Tindouf province camps, and were intrigued to hear about the reunion program--and by the fact that she spoke Spanish.

Ayala says she remembered her father telling her that there were two places in Africa you could hear Spanish: Equatorial Guinea and the Western Sahara, formerly a Spanish colony. "At the beginning, you know, it was very straightforward," Ayala told me. "A kingdom takes over this land, a liberation movement fighting for independence--"

"--aligned with the left, with socialist ideals," put in Fallshaw. "It fit with our ideas for supporting them."

"I come from a very left-wing family; my grandfather was one of the heads of the communist party in Bolivia," added Ayala. "He spent ten years in jail, fighting for democracy. It went along with all of my ideals. My father had been supporting the Polisario for a very long time." Her first visits to the camps left her impressed: "You go there and you think you are in this wonderful place. I remember thinking, 'Socialism really works!'" After her experience with the film, and attempts to orchestrate its presentation by both the Polisario and Morocco, she revised that opinion: "For me, they're both bad guys."

The two made arrangements to meet with Fetim Sellami, a Saharawi refugee, and document her reunion with her mother, whom she hadn't seen since 1975, when Spain withdrew and the Polisario Front challenged Morocco's annexation of the Western Sahara with guerrilla warfare. (Some camp members have relocated to Mauritania, and some have returned "home" to Moroccan land--which tends to provoke a political circus. But camp residents are technically at war with Morocco, despite a ceasefire established in 1991, so popping over for a visit is out.)

The film is heart-warming, then, at its outset. The documentary team is made welcome, they explore the camp, Fetim and her teenage daughter Leil are obviously excited about reunion, and you meet Deido, Fetim's "adopted" mother, who brought Fetim along when she fled to the camps. The filmmakers sensed something peculiar about Fetim's relationship with Deido (whom Leil refers to as her "white grandmother"), and with how the family reunion went, and on their third visit to the camp they learned the whole story.

That story is hotly contested: In the film, Fetim and Leil say Fetim was taken by Deido, since Fetim's mother belonged to Deido's family. Asking around, Ayala and Fallshaw find a group of other black Africans who complain strenuously about ongoing slavery in the camps, and their treatment as second-class citizens. Then, Ayala and Fallshaw told me, things got weird. They heard that the Polisario was "looking" for them, and became worried their footage might be at risk.

At this point, the film is tinged with the kind of traveler's paranoia that arises when you realize you're in a strange country, dependent on people you don't know all that well, and they seem to be looking at you strangely. (Not quite the same, but I had a flashback to a nerve-wracking half-hour in a Moroccan medina when I was reluctant to buy an expensive item and my unofficial guide seemed equally reluctant to show me the way back out.)

Gears shift abruptly, and the film turns cloak-and-dagger, with some fall-off in the continuity of filmed narrative (voice-over explains what's happening). Fallshaw and Ayala hide the tapes and skip Algeria for Paris. They meet a shadowy Moroccan operative (any Moroccan aid slacked off considerably after the two find what they see as evidence of slavery in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, too).

They fly to Mauritania. There they meet the anti-slavery camp contingent again, at a Mauritanian anti-slavery organization, SOS Slavery. The Mauritanian fight against what's known as chattel slavery lends Ayala and Fallshaw's film some credence, in that the denial of its existence in Mauritania was so reflexive: It can't exist because slavery is banned.

As an antecedent of the U.S.'s more "industrialized" slave-holding practices, with overseers, whips, and chains, chattel slavery may seem less evil in contrast. It's family-oriented (slaves are often given their owner's last name), traditional, cultural. But the involuntary adoption at a young age means that, not knowing who their biological family is, running away later means saying goodbye to family of any kind. People born and raised in it may be less likely to revolt or speak out because of those "family" ties, or because of the possibility their owner will liberate them, so it's harder to eradicate.

You can see the difficulty in determining what is and isn't slavery in Human Rights Watch's response to Ayala and Fallshaw's allegations of slavery being practiced in the camps, in 2007:

[Polisario] President Abdelaziz told Human Rights Watch, "If you find any evidence of slavery, bring it to our attention." Justice Minister Hamada Selma said, "Since the beginning of the revolution, we have completely forbidden slavery. Not merely through legislation, but through a campaign of consciousness-raising and investigation. Since 1976, not a single case involving slavery has been brought before the institutions of the Justice Ministry." He added that you will find white and black families linked to one another through the relationship of "nasib," [kinsmanship] but "this cannot be equated with slavery."

The mind-warping effects of chattel slavery--not simply a one-time betrayal, but prolonged, institutionalized trading on trust and dependency--still strains the relations of blacks and whites in the U.S.

Chattel slavery is what slave-holding whites defended themselves with when they protested that their slaves were "family" and well-taken-care-of. (To paraphrase Larry David, it's the "good" slavery.) But what's worse, Ayala asked me, "than taking children away, raping the women? They don't have the right to choose who to get married with, they work for free?"

"The slavery that we've focused on in the film," said Fallshaw, "is this unbroken chain of slavery which migrated to the U.S. Fetim and Matala are descendants of people who were taken to the Sahara and not to the Americas. This chain of slavery was ended here; in Africa it still continued."

The two hope their film pressures the United Nations to look more closely at the Polisario camps, which would not seem to be first on the Polisario's wish list. For one thing, even the population of the camps is a political hot potato: "non-partisan estimates of refugee numbers have been scarce," says our friend Wikipedia. Numbers can be the difference between an independence movement and a dissident faction.

"I think everyone understands how political the UN is," said Fallshaw. "I think they're in a difficult position because...more often than not, the UN has to say, 'Well, is it better that we're there or that we're not there?' So they have to bend with the wind of the political times to stay in the camps. They're there at the invitation of the Algerian government. If the Algerian government wants them out, they're out. I don't entirely blame them, but I also think they could do more."

(One suggestion from Ayala: The UN should create a genealogy project so that families can connect with their biological relatives, at least on paper, before another generation intervenes between the dislocations of 1975.)

The final version of the film includes a coda that encapsulates the preceding drama: Fetim was flown to Australia so she could denounce the film at its premiere. For a new set of cameras, she said she was misquoted and asked leading questions, that editing was used to make her appear to say things out of context. (Other interviewees said they were paid to talk about slavery, and even to drive to Mauritania for the meeting at SOS Slavery, though documentarians tend not, on the whole, to be flush with cash and cars.)

Depending on your nose, this hue and cry may give off more than a whiff of old-fashioned leftist show trials, where the truth must conform to a political reality. The Polisario and friends characterize Ayala and Fallshaw as both "inexperienced" and as nearly demonic masterminds bent on smearing the Polisario for Morocco, even though the film makes strong claims about slavery in Morocco, too. In fact, I don't think I've seen any Polisario criticism of that segment at all.

Ayala says while she worries about those who spoke out most strongly for the film, she has no doubt that making the film was the right thing to do.

"I was naive, maybe I thought when the film came out, everyone would say, 'Oh, this is terrible,' and they would end it...," said Ayala. "If people say I am not objective, well, I am not objective. I'm very subjective. I am against slavery! [...] We're not telling you the answers with this film. We're provoking thought. We're telling you what happened to us. We're telling you why we believe slavery exists."