Fisahara Film Festival
listen to Courtney Barnett
Photos + words by Martha Adams
The fisahara Festival is the world’s most remote film festival and the only one that awards its first-place winner a camel; the sort you need to walk home and feed.
Each year, in remote southwestern Algeria, thousands of Sahrawi refugees come together under the desert stars to enjoy movies in what Javier Bardem deems a festival that is “nothing short of a miracle.” Creative Director and Producer Martha Adams ventured to fisahara in 2013 to screen the film Girl Rising to an audience of activists, international filmmakers, musicians, political leaders and even clowns.
Everyone who flies in for the festival stays the week with a host family. I came to adore mine, especially the matriarch of the family. She, like thousands of other sahrawi women, was forced to flee on foot across the Sahara desert when morocco invaded the Western Sahara in 1975. Most of the men stayed behind to fight in a conflict that lasted more than 15 years.
On a particularly hot day, I took a break from the festival to spend time with my host family. I joined one of the daughters in a jaima, or a tent typical of Bedouin culture, while she cared for her newborn. She had already lost one baby to malnutrition and, with chronic food and water shortages, she will undoubtedly face more hardship. The Sahrawi humanitarian crisis is one of the most invisible and least known in the world. The festival aims to change that, and was created in part to call attention to their plight.
Word spread that I was in the camp to show the movie Girl Rising. Our campaign was supporting more than 2,000 events around the world that month in honor of International Day of the girl – from red carpet screenings in Delhi to poetry slams in Ghana – and I could think of no place better to be. Later on in the festival, the Ministers of Culture and Education declared the film a must-see for all in the Arab world.
Sahwari men look intimidating at first glance; wrapped in turbans, eyes behind dark sunglasses. But, in reality, most are ridiculously friendly. My favorite two, Mohamed and Abnu, escorted me everywhere I needed to go, talking about everything from Usher and rihanna to camel racing and soccer matches.
We left madrid on a chartered plane headed to tindouf, algeria. From there, we made our way in a convoy of rag-tag buses (mine was a city transit bus from Spain’s Basque country) through the desert to the Dakhla camp. From time to time, we’d stop for a “bathroom break.” I took this photo of a woman resting while the men sought relief.
