Recent Stories with tag refugee camp

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....

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