Morocco has occupied Western Sahara since 1975 in defiance of the United Nations and international law. Over the past four decades, thousands of Western Sahara’s Indigenous people, the Sahrawi, have been tortured, imprisoned, killed and disappeared while resisting the Moroccan occupation.
On Thursday, the Spanish Film Academy, which gives the Goya Awards, the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars, gave its social justice award to the Western Sahara International Film Festival and its film school, Abidin Kaid Saleh, known as FiSahara. The festival takes place in the Sahrawi refugee camps in southwestern Algeria, last month celebrated its 17th edition of the film festival. The film school is training the first generation of Sahrawi filmmakers, who are pioneering Sahrawi-made cinema, a brand-new art in Western Sahara. Their short films now tour the world, giving voice to Sahrawi refugee youth who were born in exile and are still awaiting a U.N.-promised referendum on self-determination that would allow them to return to their land, Western Sahara. The festival and the film school operate in one of the world’s remotest and toughest environments in the heart of the Sahara Desert. This is Tiba Chagaf, speaking at the award ceremony in Madrid, director of the FiSahara film festival and film school.
— source democracynow.org | Nov 28, 2022