When Motasim Morsal Adam fled the war in Sudan in 2023, he filmed everything. A young poet and filmmaker from Darfur, his journey took him through Chad, Libya and Algeria before he reached Morocco, where he currently lives as a refugee. He kept the footage safe across thousands of kilometres, including material smuggled out of prisons and detention centres. He assembled it into a video, set to an original poem he had written, intending to show it to the UNHCR in support of his asylum claim. They never gave him the opportunity.
In 2025, Motasim met Australian filmmaker David Fedele following a screening of Fedele’s film This Jungo Life in Casablanca. Fedele recognised the film’s extraordinary power immediately. When he returned to Morocco in 2026, the two collaborated to transform Motasim’s raw material into Between Exile and Loss.
The material at its heart was never intended for a cinema screen. It was made by a man documenting his own survival, one image at a time. The result is a poetic short film, composed entirely of footage and photographs captured during Motasim’s journey through Sudan, Chad, Libya, Algeria and Morocco. It transforms a journey of forced displacement into lyrical meditation on memory, exile and the struggle to survive.
