Bidun Hawiya

The political upheaval in North Africa is responsibility of the Western powers —especially of the United States and France— due to the exercise of a foreign policy based on practical and economic interests instead of ethical and theoretical principles, essential for their international politic strategies, which have generated a great instability that causes chaos and violence, as occurs in Western Sahara, the last African colony according to the UN, a region on the brink of war.

My Sahrawi family' is a report - documentary that reflects the bonds of unity between Sahrawi families and Spanish families who every summer welcome minors from refugee camps into their homes.

For more than thirty years, tens of thousands of Saharawi have lived in makeshift camps, refugees in the Algerian desert. Because of this situation, children are forced to travel far to complete their studies. Many are trained in Cuba during a period of more than twelve years away from home. This documentary chronicles the daily lives of these students, both in the desert, as in Cuba, in a round trip full of contrasts.

Every year, approximately 800 Sahrawi boys and girls leave the refugee camps to study in Cuba, Algeria and Libya… 15 years later, they return biologists, doctors, engineers… but when they get back to the refugee camps all they have is the desert…

...the desert is your own face, and if you don't love your own face, who could you love someday?...

Muslim women who leave the camps as teenagers to study in Cuba. After over a decade living in the land of salsa, they return to the desert... how will their new spirit adapt to Islamic precepts? What reasons do they have for leaving Sahara at such a young age? What is their reason for returning?

Ali Salem Hamudi Mohamed - Yahdih, was born in 1955 in El Aaiún (Western Sahara). He completed his secondary schooling in the "Spanish" Sahara. A scholarship allowed him to enrol at the Universidad de la Peninsula in 1975, but Morocco's invasion of the Sahara led him to return to the city of his birth and go into exile with his people, participating in the resistance and helping to organise the Tindouf Refugee Camps (Algeria). In 1980, the Polisario Front and the Government of Cuba offered him the opportunity to study Architecture at the University of Havana. On his return to the Camps in 1985 he worked for the SADR's Department of Construction. He designed more than twenty public buildings, including town halls, schools and nursery schools, and also collaborated with international aid organisations to build hospitals and training colleges. All of these buildings were built collectively by the Saharan people. ;In 1999 he emigrated to Spain. His family joined him five years later.

The history of Western Sahara was cut short more than 40 years ago. One, two and almost three generations have seen their life expectations and those of their children frustrated, powerless in the face of the impunity with which Morocco continues to occupy their territory. Through the life of Hask, a Sahrawi who has been living in Spain since he was 12 years old, the story of people who live in a borrowed desert far from their home is told.

A documentary about the situation of the saharawi people in the refugee camps of Tindouf through the life and participation in the 2019 Sahara Marathon of the saharawi athlete and political refugee Amaidan Salah. An amateur documentary made using only a cellphone.

Testimonies of a people enlisted on the path of independence. Records taken at refugee camps in Tindouf (Sahara Desert in southern Algeria) and Bir Lehlu (region liberated by the Polisario Front)

Young Mohamed Dih, who in Seville, returns to his birthplace – a refugee camp in Western Sahara. Time flows differently here: the times of the day are marked by calls to prayer and the seasons – by the rainfall. When a torrential downpour destroys his family’s home, the protagonist stays in the camp for longer to help to rebuild it.

Their desert was not the same since they last saw it. The dunes kept memories of a childhood bathed in sun and sand, when minutes passed by in a stalling time. It has been long since they moved to the city, in search of a better future. They left, switching their tents for high buildings in busy boulevards, bearing in mind their responsibility towards their society. Each step marked by the commitment to make of their training the future of their people. It is the outcry of souls deep-rooted in tradition, in culture, in the stories of their sand. The desert was not the same, it may have never been. This documental show how they left to change it.