AUSERD REFUGEE CAMP, Algeria—At about 10 p.m., in the middle of the Sahara desert, just two lights were shining: the moon and a projection screen. Around 70 people gathered in front of the screen as a film was beamed onto it from a 16-wheeler truck. Some sat on carpets, rolled out over rocky, reddish sand; others crouched on low dunes. They all watched attentively as a voice boomed from speakers:
“Those who don’t know the Sahara think there’s nothing here but sand. But in the Sahara is an occupied country. And a people in exile.”
It was the second night of the 17th edition of FiSahara, the Western Sahara International Film Festival, held on Oct. 11-16 in the Auserd refugee camp in Algeria’s westernmost province of Tindouf, which borders Mauritania, Morocco, and Western Sahara. Auserd—along with four other neighboring camps—formed in the mid-1970s, when Morocco invaded Western Sahara after Spanish decolonization and around 50,000 of the region’s Indigenous Sahrawi people fled.
