Recent Stories with tag stolen

It's the long holiday weekend, so it's good that there's lots of new movies out on DVD.  Let's run down the list of new films, care of our friends at Scarecrow Video (now with video games!).

The biggest release this week is definitely Hot Tub Time Machine, which I saw in a theater of people laughing so loudly that I will need to see it again, just to catch all the jokes I missed the first time.  There's also Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, based on the popular children's book series, and the remake of The Crazies, in which virus-infected water makes Timothy Olyphant something-something.

In terms of foreign films, there's the Oscar-nominated black-and-white looming dread of pre-WWI small-town Germany in The White Ribbon, which director Michael Haneke accurately described as "a horror film without the horror." There's also The Eclipse--no not that one.  This is an almost-perfect Irish ghost story set at a writers' conference.  Spooky scary!  Let's hope that there's never an American remake.  Same goes for Everlasting Moments, a delicate look at a female photographer challenging societal norms in early 1900s Sweden.  And for something completely different, Warlords features Jet Li and lots of epic Chinese battles....

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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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