Dancing Turtle Films is proud to announce the release of La Badil — Arabic for No Other Choice — a new short documentary directed by Dominic Brown and co-produced with Peri Nirupan, filmed undercover in Western Sahara earlier this year.
Western Sahara is one of the world’s most overlooked conflicts. Lying at a crossroads between Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania, it has been under Moroccan occupation since 1975, when a mass civilian march orchestrated by King Hassan II forced the Spanish colonial authorities out and installed a new occupier in their place. A UN-mediated ceasefire in 1991 promised a referendum on self-determination. More than twenty years later, that referendum has still not taken place. More than 200,000 Sahrawis live in refugee camps in Algeria. Those who remain in the occupied territory live under a continued Moroccan military presence and face persistent allegations of human rights abuses.
The immediate backdrop to the film is the Gdeim Izik protest camp of 2010, in which over 15,000 Sahrawis gathered in the Western Sahara desert to demand an end to social inequality and Moroccan rule. Moroccan forces forcibly dismantled the camp, sparking violent clashes in which four Sahrawis and eleven Moroccan soldiers were killed. The international media largely ignored it. The uprising is now widely regarded as a precursor to the Arab Spring — a moment of popular resistance that the world missed entirely.
Two years on, on the anniversary of the uprising, Brown and Nirupan entered the region undercover to document what remained. La Badil is the result — fifteen minutes of first-hand testimony from those who lived through the events, including an elderly woman attacked in her home by Moroccan security forces just one day before the cameras arrived.
The documentary also examines the role of international actors, and in particular France’s political influence, its trade ties with Morocco, and its position within the United Nations — a dimension of the conflict that rarely receives the scrutiny it deserves.
Available now through Dancing Turtle Films.
