DIRECTOR NOTES
When my friend Mattia asked me to make a documentary about the Saharawi people I agreed immediately, instinctively. I knew very little about Sahrawis, but what occurred to me at that time, was the memory of this people who I knew had spent a long time fighting for independence.
Mattia has been working for 10 years in Sahrawi refugee camps and, together with association El-Ouali, he organizes every year an international solidarity event for
Saharawis, the Sahara Marathon through which hundreds of people live a singular experience: one week with Saharawis, in their tents, out in Southern Algerian Sahara.
Through participation to the marathon, these foreigners, mostly westerners, can see and understand the difficulties in which an entire population lives, deciding to sacrifice its own wellbeing in exchange for freedom.
The idea of using the Sahara Marathon as narrative ploy emerges not only to tell the Sahrawi people today, but also to address the historical causes linked to the conflict with Morocco, which resulted in building a defensive wall in the middle of desert, to tell about the war, the exodus to Algeria, the separation from families who remained back in the occupied territories, the life in refugee camps and dependent on humanitarian aid. Finally, to know that there is a public referendum on self-determination, which Sahrawi have been expecting for nineteen years.
The choice of the marathon as a metaphor of discovering a community which, for thirty five years, has struggled for independence, was made in order to be consistent and to shout through images and life stories of people excluded from the media stage because of the absence of an armed conflict.
Marathon as representation of an intense experience of fatigue and awareness of those sacrifices and daily difficulties connected with life in refugee camps. Marathon as a story, Cristiana’s, runner among many, who is thrown into a universe that she would have never imagined. Cristiana guides us in this trip, a race that raises questions, makes us think, throughout history, with discretion and emotions at the same time. The look of this young woman could be our’s, anyone’s or in any way, it should be so.
But a marathon was also the organization for 1514. Choosing not to search immediately for funding and therefore to self produce the film, allowed us to be fast, agile and to start immediately with production. A film born and developed while on the move, between Rome and Bologna, organized in a month, February 2009 and shot in twelve days by a team of five women. A task which requested long evenings of exploration and study, trying to understand a very complex historical situation and the singular path that would take us to a refugee camp in the desert of the Sahara.
Everything was clear after our arrival in Smara camp. Long journeys across the desert, reaching various camps, and nights spent smoking, listening to the stories of Mohamed, the person who put us up and also our guide, allowed us to find the right key to understand what here, for many years, has kept this nomad tribe blocked in the middle of Sahara: the determination of the wait.
A troupe formed only by women was a premeditated choice and it helped a lot in achieving the film. Mainly because we found ourselves telling the life of a particular matriarchal Muslim society, where respect for the female identity,
parity for gender roles and evaluation of women are acquired customs since a very long time.
In conclusion, I would dwell on how I decided to represent the Sahrawis story. Despite the actual tragicity around every aspect of their daily life, I could have chosen to tell this story privileging, above all, sensational and emotional aspects associated with their drama. Instead, I preferred to let them speak, offering all of them the possibility to tell themselves through their dignity.
I am strongly convinced that involvement in topics, such as human rights, is most effective when it stimulates in the spectator the recognition of others dignity and integrity, beyond the tragic tied to the facts. And I believe that only the real sharing of universal principles could stimulate the intensity of our outrage and push for request for a real change.
The message that we deduce from the speeches and the voice of Sahrawi, is that of a people wishing strongly for the principle of self determination, as it was developed in 1945 by the Human Rights Charter.
Women, men and children resisting, trying to build, every day, the basis for a different and concrete future. In doing this, Saharawis have never lost positivity, friendliness and openness towards the Other, the Stranger, notes and key characteristics which distinguish these EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE in a distant land. TO YOU THE PRIVILEGE TO DISCOVER THEIR ESSENCE, told through our eyes.
