THE Americans have their Oscars, the French have their Palme
d'Or, and the Spanish their Goyas. At the Second Annual Sahara
International Film Festival, the winner for best picture was given an
albino camel. Not a statue, but an actual white dromedary.
The humped beast seemed to take it quite well as it was led into
the midst of the cheering crowd and presented to Moussa Sene
Absa, the Senegalese director of the film Madame Brouette, about
a divorced mother who rebels against the social and personal
abuse she has been subject to all her life. There were no martinis
or bikinis at this desert Cannes, which took place last weekend in
the Ausserd refugee camp on the edge of the Algerian border in
the Western Sahara.
It's one of the unfriendliest places on earth, known mostly for its
phosphate mines. The Saharawi have lived here for 28 years, since
they fled invading Moroccan troops after the Spanish gave up their
colonies in the so-called Spanish Sahara. Today the Saharawi,
formerly nomadic Beduin tribes, number 185,000. Nearly half of
them were born in the camps.
Hence the film festival, which was started two years ago by the
Spanish film community to bring attention to these mostly forgotten
refugees, this year drew more than 400 participants. The entries
included movies from Denmark, India, and Cuba, as well as the
Spanish film The Sea Inside, which took the award for Best
Foreign Film at this year's Oscars.
"The whole world has forgotten them," says Lola Dueñas, one of
the stars of the The Sea Inside. "Maybe by being here we will bring
some attention to their situation."
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.
For the movie folk attending the festival, the trip began with an
arrival at the Algerian military airport in Tindouf and a bumpy 90-
minute ride in ancient buses and Jeeps across the desert into the
middle of the pitch-black refugee camp. The Saharawi refugees
instantly surrounded them, the children asking for sweets. The
Spaniards immediately got out cigarettes, cigars and mobiles.
After the chaos of unloading was sorted out, the participants
waited to be assigned to a Saharawi family. Everybody, from
starlets to journalists, spent the four days of the festival bunking
with the Saharawi in canvas tents and clay huts. The habitations
were clean and simple, with rugs for beds and light provided by a
jury-rigged system using car batteries.
The organisers were nervous about the first night, because the
wind was whipping up the desert sand and it might prove too harsh
to hold the festival outdoors. But by the time darkness fell at 9pm
the wind had died down and the films were shown on a giant
outdoor screen.
The rest of the festival went relatively smoothly. Icíar Bollaín's
Flowers from Another World, a moving film about Cuban immigrants
in Spain, was cut short after a sexy scene was deemed too intense
for the children by the Saharawi leaders. With the young ones
gone, the film resumed.
Bollaín, who has also starred in Ken Loach's Land and Freedom
and won the Goya for her film on domestic violence, I Give You My
Eyes, usually turns down invitations to film festivals, but this was
an exception. "We have a historical debt and a moral debt" to the
Saharawi, she said. Anyway, she added with a smile, "it's more of
a happening than a festival".
The festival was not all about stars and award-winners. Workshops
were set up in which professional directors, cinematographers and
film professors taught the refugees their craft.
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.
One of his students, Lehbib Amed Salem, dreams of being a film
director and would like to continue to study film, perhaps in Cuba,
where many Saharawi youths go for secondary school and
university.
And what about the prize of the white camel? Sene Absa gave him
to the family he stayed with. Better than an Oscar any day.