Stolen

One of the greatest feelings for a journalist is when you cover what seems a routine story, but realise something a lot bigger is going on.

It’s the reason most people enter the profession in the first place; to truly lift the lid on a scandal of which the world is unaware. But it automatically puts the pressure up another notch – especially if the people who gave you the tip-off or granted you access aren’t quite so keen to see the new story told.

Such was the experience of Australian filmmakers Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw, who initially set out to document the plight of refugees from the conflict in Western Sahara.

The region – the only Spanish-speaking part of Africa – is a former Spanish colony now largely controlled by Morocco. But it has sought independence for many years, with the battle largely being waged by the Polisario liberation movement.

The conflict has resulted in thousands of refugees fleeing the area for camps in Algeria, administered by the Polisario. The filmmakers were given access to one such camp and initially thought the story would be one of the courage in adversity shown by families living in basic accommodation in the middle of a desert, thousands of miles from relatives whom they had often not seen for decades.

An undoubtedly worthy and important project, showing the human cost of an impasse usually only glimpsed in brief TV bulletins or the foreign sections of the quality newspapers. But in focusing on Fetim, a teacher in the camp and the main provider for a large extended family, Ayala and Fallshaw began to realise there was more to her situation than met the eye.

Fetim’s mother was still living in Western Sahara (a central feature of the original project, which remains in the film, was their reunion) but the family was presided over by a ‘white’ matriarch. The more they filmed, the more the duo grew to believe that Fetim was essentially a slave. Further research seemed to indicate that many of the refugees who were black, rather than Arabic, had the same status and that this was, and had been, a reality of life in Western Sahara for as long as any of the refugees could remember.

Even more controversially, the Polisario seemed to be aware of it and in no hurry to change the situation. The irony of a ‘liberation’ movement allowing slavery to exist in camps under its control was not lost on the filmmakers and they began to refocus the film on making this known to the wider world.

It was at this point that the Polisario withdrew their co-operation. Ayala and Fallshaw were detained and deported. They then faced a struggle to retrieve their original tapes, which remained hidden in Algeria. This lends the film an air of political thriller, as Paris-based middlemen offer to arrange for the tapes to be smuggled into neighbouring Mauritania and the filmmakers confront both Polisario and Moroccan representatives at a UN conference in New York.

They manage to retrieve the tapes and are granted permission by Morocco to film scenes with Fetim’s family in Western Sahara. But there they find evidence suggesting that slavery is still thriving, and tacitly accepted, under Moroccan rule also. The PR operations of both sides swing into action and the filmmakers find that they themselves are now under scrutiny – of the covert as well as the official kind...

It’s an urgent, impassioned work which has won a hatful of awards and featured in 2010's Raindance Festival. But it has continued to attract controversy, with the filmmakers’ assertions and methods challenged at screenings and online. Fetim herself has gone on record to deny that she is a slave, claiming her comments and those of her family were distorted (the filmmakers believe this was done under pressure from the Polisario). One comes away from it with the definite sense that there’s a story here which needs to be told, but which a lot of powerful interests would rather remained hidden.

But it also shows the dangers and consequences of trying to find out the truth, especially when this will inevitably impact on the lives of people whom you have come to know as more than just documentary subjects. A confrontation at the film’s Sydney premiere, and a phone conversation with Fetim’s daughter where she says the directors “did a bad thing trying to do a good one” offer two of the film’s most poignant moments.

The filmmakers’ willingness to question their own motives is refreshingly honest, but at the same time the viewer can’t help but be on their side as they battle the hostility of Morocco and the Polisario, and the frustrated annoyance of the UN officials who see the issue as a deep-seated cultural one and another of the many problems they have to deal with on a daily basis.

The circumstances of the film mean that on occasion it has something of a rough and ready feel. The short running time is frustrating, because there’s a definite sense of this being a story that touches on a lot of wider issues. But in a vintage year for documentaries, Stolen proves once again that modern film technology offers an excellent medium for attempting to fulfil the journalist’s age-old brief; saying something that someone doesn’t want the world to hear.