The room where Galia Salek is about to debut has no walls or seats: it is a stage in the middle of the desert. Enthusiasm overcomes her initial shyness. Clad in an orange melfa, her words come out in spurts when she talks about cinema. She is 23 years old and premieres her first short at Fisahara, the International Film Festival born in 2003 in the Saharawi refugee camps, in the south of Algeria.
A hundred meters from where Gaila waits impatiently, a truck slides in the sand with a screen of more than four meters attached to its skeleton. The vehicle advances in front of a crowd of women and children, who are gathered on a green tarp, sitting in the open sky, waiting for the screening of new filmmakers to begin, such as Galia Salek, from the Sahrawi audiovisual training school Abidin Raid Salen. Above her heads the sun gives its last punches before hiding behind a horizon of adobe houses, concrete and metal roofs. There is silence. The movie is about to start. One more year, cinema reaches the heart of the Sahara.
We are in the Auserd countryside, in the Algerian hamada, 1,500 kilometers from Algiers, 700 from Rabat and 500 from El Aaiún. The desert of deserts. A stony and arid land that since 1975 is also home to thousands of Sahrawi refugees. Since Morocco invaded the former Spanish colony, a large part of the Sahrawi people fled to the desert. Now more than 1,750,000 people live among the five camps that extend south of Tindouf, according to data from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
They live in a state of oblivion for almost more than half a century that has been deepened by Spain’s change of position in 2022 on the Sahara, when President Pedro Sánchez sided with Rabat and, in the face of Sahrawi indignation, considered the autonomy proposal as the “most serious, realistic and credible basis for the resolution of the dispute” in the former Spanish colony.
In a context like this, Fisahara is not just a film festival. After 49 years of permanent provisionality, the Fisahara screen is for the Sahrawis a window to the world to shout against a forgotten exile. “Cinema has the power to send our stories far beyond the Sahrawi camps,” explains Ahmed Mahmud, national director of Film and Theater of the Ministry of Culture of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which Spain does not recognize but which is part of the African Union and that 84 other states do recognize.
21 years have passed since Fishara first turned on its screen in the Algerian hamada and, in this time, the seventh art has stopped being a guest and has taken root in the fields. The passion of young people like Galia Salek encapsulates the essence of this change.
The first edition was held in 2003 in fields without electricity or mobile phones. The houses were made of adobe and the cinema landed from Spain like an alien in a conservative Muslim society. Galia Salek was two years old and was just taking her first steps. Ahmed Mahmud, who did participate, remembers the confusion of the Sahrawis in that first edition: “it meant a radical social change to bring cinema to the fields.”
Two decades later, cinema no longer lands, it is part of the fields. This week, the Sahrawis launch the 18th edition of the festival – there were three years in which it was not held – in some fields that look like others. With electricity and mobile phones, in many houses, concrete has replaced adobe and air conditioning has alleviated the suffocating summers. But where cinema has also left its mark: a film school and a new generation of filmmakers trying to elbow their way out of the Algerian mainstream.
Gaila Salek wants her stories to cross the desert. “I want to make films in a place other than this, I have many ideas in my mind and from here it is very difficult to make them,” she explains.
This year the Sahrawis launch a festival that bears the local signature. And for María Carrión, executive director of the event, it is a source of pride. “Increasingly, participation, presentations and programming are Sahrawi,” she defends under the incessant heat at the festival site.
The flagship of this edition is Insumisas, a short film that tells the lives of five women activists from Western Sahara. And one of the stars of the festival is the screening of Desert Phosfate, by international Sahrawi artist Mohammed Sleiman Labat. In this feature film, Sleiman explores in a visual narrative the impact of phosphate extraction on the Sahrawi population. For Sleiman, “it is not so much about telling stories about Sahrawis but rather it is the Sahrawi gaze that tells these stories.”
This is precisely the proposal of Galia Salek, the youngest face of this new generation. In her short film Destiny Is Not in Your Hands, the filmmaker presents herself to the world through the conflict of motherhood. It is a story in which the refugee camp is just a backdrop. “It could be the story of any other woman in the world, for me it is important to tell stories beyond the conflict and for anyone to empathize,” she says.
Salek’s short film moves across the screen glowing under a star-filled sky. The spectators, silenced from the first scene, are applauded and whistled when the final credits appear. The author, camouflaged among the public, tries unsuccessfully to hide her satisfied smile. It’s late night and the screenings have just begun. There is still a lot of cinema ahead. Sahrawi cinema has begun its path to cross the desert.
