Watch The Desert of the desert (2016) Online Free
'The Desert of the Desert' is a feature documentary about one of the longest-running and least- known colonial conflicts and the plight of the Sahrawi desert nomads of Western Sahara since Morocco's 1975 invasion. Shot in Jan./Feb. 2014 in the Saharawi Liberated Territories of Western Sahara, and in the Saharawi Refugee Camps in Tindouf, Algeria, the film shows the saga of the Sahrawis, their struggle to regain their homeland and the sad paradox of a nomadic people forced to live in confinement. During production, the crew made a rare treck through 3,000 kilometers of bleak and dangerous desert, becoming unwitting participants in the conflict when their jeep was blown up by an anti-tank mine less than a kilometer from their destination on Western Sahara's Atlantic coast.
More Like This
Salam
The Sahrawi people have lived in exile for almost half a century in the driest desert of the African continent. There, where basic resources such as water are scarce, there is a film school. As the world looks the other way, a group of young filmmakers carries out a battle against oblivion.
2024
Sand bellies
The Algerian region of Tindouf is home to more than 170,000 Sahrawis, who have been living in refugee camps since 1976, when Morocco occupied the Western Sahara region. In a place of inhospitable conditions and scarcity, the Sahrawi population lives on dwindling humanitarian aid. Six percent of them face the added difficulty of coeliac disease.
2024
The time after the rain
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.
2023
The hidden fire
Silence always surrounds the mine, first when it explodes and then when it eternally haunts its victims. The history of the silence of this fire hidden by Morocco in the sand of Western Sahara has left more than 4,000 victims in what is considered the largest minefield in the world. Daha and Fatimetu suffered the effect of the silence of the mines, their lives changed forever, like that of the Saharawi people who, after 14 years cleaning the desert of artifacts, the rupture of the ceasefire have left the future of the contamination of their territory.
2023
Champs-Elysées
A boy has a dream of traveling to the world, especially to Paris where his uncle lives, but a wall built on his land divides his country and does not allow him to travel or cross to the other side of his land.
2023
Four Days in Occupied Western Sahara—A Rare Look Inside Africa's Last Colony
In this exclusive broadcast, Democracy Now! breaks the media blockade and goes to occupied Western Sahara in the northwest of Africa to document the decades-long Sahrawi struggle for freedom and Morocco's violent crackdown. Morocco has occupied the territory since 1975 in defiance of the United Nations and the international community. Thousands have been tortured, imprisoned, killed and disappeared while resisting the Moroccan occupation. A 1,700-mile wall divides Sahrawis who remain under occupation from those who fled into exile. The international media has largely ignored the occupation—in part because Morocco has routinely blocked journalists from entering Western Sahara. But in late 2016 Democracy Now! managed to get into the Western Saharan city of Laayoune, becoming the first international news team to report from the occupied territory in years.
2020
To See El Aaiún
In the depths of the Algerian desert the Sahrawi people have been dwelling in the refugee camps for over 40 years. Camps gradually turned into settlements, named after towns in their homeland Western Sahara. One of them is called El Aaiún.
2020
Hamada
Filled with vitality, humor and unexpected situations, Hamada paints an unusual portrait of a group of young friends living in a refugee camp in the middle of nowhere. Western Sahara is known as “the last colony in Africa” and this conflict is the longest and one of the least known ongoing disputes in the continent, but the Sahrawi people refuse to become invisible.
2019
Laatash
The Saharawi women face the thirst of the hamada, the curse of the desert, every day. They’ve built their refuge in a land where no one could survive before. For more than forty years they’ve been holding out and taking care of their people there. They ensure every drop of water is distributed according to the needs of each family … and they wait. But there’s an even more terrible thirst in their throats, for which they find no relief.
2019
Life is waiting: referendum and resistance in Western Sahara
Forty years after its people were promised freedom by departing Spanish rulers, Western Sahara remains Africa's last colony. This film chronicles the everyday violence experienced by Sahrawis living under Moroccan occupation and voices the aspirations of a desert people for whom the era of colonialist never ended.
2015
My Sahrawi family
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.
2014
Coría and the sea
This is a story about women who are fighters, tenacious, hopeful, active women…who were capable of lifting, from nothingness, in the harshest landscape of the world, life. They are the Sahrawi women. 40 years ago, they were forced into exile; the men of this region, marched to war and the women created “temporary cities”: The Refugee Camps. They invented a new day to day life which made possible a sustainable existence and a hope, of one day returning home. Coría every night dreams of the sea; the majestic image of its water, the sound of its waves, are the echoes that join the people with their homeland. The will beats in the hearts of the Sahrawi women who maintain their unbreakable spirit, ever moving forward.
2014
Musawat, inclusion in the Sahrawi camps
Education Center for disabled children located in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria. Despite the precarious conditions in which this population lives since 40 years ago, the Polisario Front as the representative of the Sahrawi people has promoted inclusion as a way to avoid marginalization and discrimination of one of the most vulnerable populations within these territories: children with special needs. "Castro" is the man who devotes his life to this beautiful project fighting all odds: physical, psychic, social, economic, and even the incomprehensions of his own society. The Sahrawis are living (resisting) in one of the harshest deserts on Earth but Castro has the magic formula to achieve the inclusion of these wonderful beings in his society and in the rest of the world: MUSAWAT, EQUALITY.
2014
Sons of the Clouds: The Last Colony
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.
2012
Lost land
Straddling a 2,400-kilometer-long wall constructed by the Moroccan army, the Western Sahara is today divided into two sections — one occupied by Morocco, the other under the control of the Sahrawi National Liberation Movement’s Polisario Front. Drawing from stories of flight, exile, interminable waiting and the arrested, persecuted lives on both sides of that wall, this film bears witness to the Sahrawi people, their land, their entrapment in other people’s dreams. In an esthetic that sublimates the real, Lost Land resonates like a score that juxtaposes sonorous landscapes, black-and-white portraits and nomadic poetics.
2011
Robbed of Truth
This is the true story of Fetim Salam, a Saharawi refugee falsely portrayed as a slave in the Australian documentary 'Stolen'. Australian filmmakers, Violeta Ayala and Daniel Fallshaw, travel to the Saharawi refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria in 2007 and claim to discover 20,000 slaves in the camps run by the independence movement Polisario Front. Refugees are outraged for being portrayed as slaves, and humanitarian aid workers are incredulous about these allegations as they know the camps intimately. Filmmaker Carlos Gonzalez retraces their steps in search of the truth and finds a web of lies, misinformation and Moroccan operatives reshaping the truth.
2011
Journey to Saharawi – The Courage to Live for Freedom
In the stunning and starkly beautiful landscape of Western Sahara, Walter Bencini recounts his journey to meet the Saharawi people, uprooted from their lands for decades and confined to desert tent camps named after the Moroccan cities where they once lived. It's the solidarity journey of a group of people from Valdarno, delivering the money and medicines raised through various initiatives directly into the hands of the beneficiaries.
2010
Heiresses
Two planes take off at the same time headed in opposite directions. Fatimetu and Ejehla. Two distinct lives destined to follow similar paths. One past desired, but fuzzy, and a future. One inheritance, becoming more and more fragile. “Heirs” gathers the testimony of different generations of women who live within and outside of the camps and paints a profile of the present situation in which these Sahrawi women live and the future they've inherited, living in an orphan-like territory separated from their homeland for more than 33 years…
2009
Lalia
Lalia is a Saharaui girl who lives in a refugee camp in Algiers. She has only heard her grandmother and grandfather talk about her country, about the Sahara, that was taken away by Morroco. She dreams of one day seeing the ocean, seeing her real country. The reality she lives in is different... the uncertainty of the refugee camps, the political unbalance... but she is strong... and she knows that there can be change... she won't stop dreaming, and she won't stop longing..
1999
Sahrawi people
Documentary about the arduous early years of the Sahrawi cause (1977)
1977