Cinema project in the Western Sahara: justmessaging.com
A New Cultural Adventure: Cinema, Western Sahara & the HRC
A team from the Hispanic Research Centre, with the support of the LTEU and eLearning, successfully ran an audiovisual workshop with Saharawis in the refugee camps during the FISahara international film festival in May 2009. The workshop took place in the most remote of the four camps, Dakhla, which is situated around 150 km away from the nearest town of Tindouf, in an extremely desolate desert region of SouthWestern Algeria.
The project was conceived following Isabel Santaolalla’s visit to the refugee camps in 2008, where she became directly acquainted with the plight of the Saharawi people. During this first visit Isabel video-taped messages from Saharawis aimed at Roehampton University students. When she returned a website was created to upload these messages to give voice to this forgotten people and open up a new means of communication between the Saharawis and the rest of the world. Subsequently, with the help of Roehampton’s e-Learning advisor Andy Hoang, the support of the LTEU, and the initiative of five Spanish graduates on internships at Roehampton (Aurora Aguilella, Kalín Coromina, Teresa Iniesta, Irene León and Yolanda Macías), the project expanded and led to the recording of a larger number of video messages from students and members of staff at Roehampton in response to the Saharawi situation.
These may be viewed at www.justmessaging.com, where you'll find a brief explanatory paragraph and a short video-summary made by the team of assistants, which will give you a very good idea of what was done prior to and during the workshop in the refugee camp. You can also view the two-minute documentary made by AFP (Agence France Presse) on the workshop.
In July 2009 a British Academy 'Small Research Grant' was awarded to continue working on this project. The award will be used to compile and disseminate a bibliographic and filmographic research database on cinema and the Saharawi People. This database will be available to any interested parties via a University of Roehampton website and via the Sandblast website. The data will be searchable, so as to assist outside parties in quickly identifying specific data, and it will also be made available for download.
The Power of justmessaging.com: Media Success
Ideas and projects might be good, but they are even better if people talk about them. This is the ongoing story of “Just Messaging”, an original project aimed at providing an outlet for communication between those living in the Saharawi refugee camps and the outside world.
As well as the team behind the project and its participants, this idea has captivated many journalists and researchers around the world. Instances of this can be found in the short TV item made by Marina de Russé and Madeleine Predel from Agence France-Presse, the articles by Stefan Simanowitz in The Independent and in New Internationalist, the article by Paul Rigg in University World News and the mention to the project in The Times Higher Education.
And this is only the beginning. The website of the project “Just Messaging” hosts many other Western Sahara-related topics that will make you shout for freedom. Get involved!
The Western Sahara Audiovisual Database can be found here