In April 2023, war broke out in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. What followed became the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. More than 15 million people have been displaced. In Darfur, where the memory of the early 2000s genocide remains unresolved, the RSF seized large parts of the region, targeting civilian communities in what senior UN officials have described as crimes that may amount to genocide. One in two people across Sudan now require urgent humanitarian aid. The world has largely looked away.
Motasim Morsal Adam is one of the millions who fled. A poet and filmmaker from Darfur, he left in 2023 and made his way through Chad, Libya, Algeria and Morocco, filming everything as he went. Not for an audience. To document his own survival, one image at a time. He kept the footage safe across thousands of kilometres, including material smuggled out of prisons and detention centres.
When he arrived in Morocco, he did what the system told him to do. He went to the UNHCR. He assembled his footage and photographs into a video, wrote an original poem to accompany it, and prepared to present the evidence of what he had lived through in support of his asylum claim. They never gave him the opportunity to show it. His claim remains unresolved.
This is not unusual. The UNHCR processes millions of claims. Individual testimony, however powerful, rarely finds an audience in a system built around forms, categories and eligibility criteria. What Motasim had made was not a form. It was a film. And films, in that context, have nowhere to go.
In 2025, he attended a screening of David Fedele’s This Jungo Life in Casablanca. He showed Fedele the video he had made for the UNHCR. Fedele recognised its extraordinary power immediately. When he returned to Morocco in 2026, the two collaborated to transform Motasim’s raw material into Between Exile and Loss — composed entirely of footage and photographs captured during the journey through Sudan, Chad, Libya, Algeria and Morocco, with Motasim’s poem running through it.
The result is a seven-minute film that the UNHCR never watched but that audiences across the world can now see. It asks an uncomfortable question about the gap between those two facts. Motasim made something of genuine artistic and human power to support a bureaucratic process that declined to engage with it. The film that emerged from that refusal is more lasting than any asylum determination would have been.
The material was never intended for a cinema screen. That it has arrived there is a testament to what Motasim carried, and to Fedele’s instinct for recognising when footage contains something irreplaceable.
Motasim currently lives in Morocco as a refugee. His asylum claim remains unresolved.
Between Exile and Loss is available to stream in HD via the Dancing Turtle shop.
