For a week each May, a desolate refugee camp plays host to the Sahara International Film Festival, helping to raise awareness of the plight of 'Africa's last colony
The International Sahara Film Festival was first held in 2004. It is now an annual event which takes place in the Sahrawi refugee camps in the South West Corner of Algeria, near the border with Western Sahara. The festival has the two-fold aim of providing cultural entertainment and educational opportunities to refugees, and of raising awareness of the plight of the Sahrawi people, who have been exiled from their native western Sahara for more than three decades.
This year's festival was set up by award-winning Peruvian documentary filmmaker Javier Corcuera to both entertain and educate the refugees while also raising awareness internationally of the plight of the Saharawi people. More than 500 international participants (mainly Spanish) flew into Tindouf on charter planes and traveled to the sprawling ochre-colored camp in a convoy of vehicles. The central screen is surrounded by tents for workshops, exhibitions and indoor screenings as well as numerous stalls. The programme includes over 40 films from around the world. The themes mainly explore diverse experiences of struggle and hope, but there is some lighter entertainment and even an animated film which holds enraptured the capacity crowd of refugee children.
The film festival is part of a project led by Sahrawi women. After long and bloody war, women take a different approach to their fight by educating their people for self reliant media production. Audiovisual workshops run by the London-based charity Sandblast, provide Saharawi refugees with an opportunity to learn about all aspects of film-making as well as create their own video messages, which are put online to raise public attention to their cause. "The objective is to carry out activities for cultural diffusion framed by the cinematic realm"
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