Inspired by the first film in this series, this section looks at areas where struggles are born and maintain. Each film tells the story of an area that has been politicised by occupation and protected through people’s resistance. The three films exhibit various dynamics in the way that documentary can engage with the people, their movement and their land. In Spaces of Exception, Malek Rasamny and Matt Peterson create a unique and active link between Native Americans in reservations across the United States and Palestinians in refugee camps around Lebanon. The film asks what connections can be made between them and the spaces they inhabit. And what, specifically in spaces such as these, are the kinds of resistance that can be born towards a self-determination and autonomy? Amussu documents reality and performance that feed into a peaceful revolt. Village farmers in Imidir, Morocco protect their land from threats of the silver mine next door. And finally, Lost Land is an observational documentary that meditates on the Sahrawi people’s peaceful defiance against violent confines. Portraits of people and of landscape tell the story of a place where the people and land become one.
Spaces of Exception (2019)
90’ min| US / Lebanon | English
Director: Matt Peterson & Malek Rasamny
Profiling the American Indian reservation alongside the Palestinian refugee camp, Spaces of Exception was filmed from 2014 to 2017 in Arizona, New Mexico, New York, and South Dakota, as well as Lebanon and the West Bank. It is an attempt to understand the significance of the land – its memory and divisions – and the conditions for life, community, and sovereignty. Filmmakers Malek Rasamny and Matt Peterson seek what these spaces embody. Camps, as they describe them, are the birthplace of both Intifadas, a safekeeping space for memory and tradition. The American reservations are also spaces where native traditions are alive and practiced. Both these spaces are also living examples of the humanitarian contradiction and failure brought on by occupation and colonisation respectively.
Spaces of Exception comes out of the long-term multimedia project “The Native and the Refugee”. Please visit the project’s main hub - https://thenativeandtherefugee.com/ - for more videos and essays.
Amussu (2019)
100’ min| Morocco | Tamazight with English Subtitles
Director: Nader Bouhmouche
Imider, a village in southeastern Morocco: A rapacious silver mine has syphoned aquifer water for decades, drying out the almond groves belonging to a small Amazigh community. Fearing their fragile oasis might disappear and their livelihoods destroyed, the villagers peacefully rebelled in 2011 and shut down a major water pipeline heading towards the mine. Seven years later, they continue to occupy it in a protest camp which has now practically turned into a small solar-powered village. However, backed by conniving intelligence services and aggressively protected by the police, Africa’s biggest silver mine is no easy adversary. Dozens have been arrested for taking part in what the villagers have called “Amussu of Ubrid n ’96” (Movement on Road ’96). Nonetheless, the resilient villagers continue to resist with the little means they have—songs, dry bread, weekly protests, a flimsy camera, a film festival and endless ingenuity.
This interview between Pascale Fakhry, Creative Director of ALFILM, and Nadir Bouhmouch, director of Amussue, explores some of the issues in the film: the mine, the movement and the contexts therein. (The conversation is in English.)
Lost Land (2011)
France, Belgium 2011
Director: Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd
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 aesthetic that sublimates the real, Lost Land resonates like a score that juxtaposes sonorous landscapes, black-and-white portraits and poetics.