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Tropfest has announced that Charles Randolph, celebrated international screenwriter and producer of the 2011 box office hit 'Love and Other Drugs', will present the keynote address at filmmaker symposium, Tropfest Roughcut, on Saturday 18 February, 2012. Randolph will travel from...
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The Truth Is Out There. Day 9 of the Sydney Film Festival. A Daily Blog.
The Sydney Film Festival made it on to the front pages of the newspapers, but was it for the right reason?
A film already generating controversy at the festival saw its contentious subject go into overdrive today. At the world premiere of Stolen, an expose of alleged slavery in the Saharan desert from local filmmakers Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw and produced by celebrated documentary filmmaker Tom Zubrycki, one of their central subjects, Faitim Salam, arrived from her Western Saharan home to directly confront the filmmakers on what she says is a fabrication. Salam claims that neither she nor any of her people are slaves.
But Ayala and Fallshaw's documentary reveals a far different situation. They had set out to capture a reunion of a daughter (Salam) - one of thousands living in exile in refugee camps as a result of Morocco's invasion of Western Sahara - and her mother whom she had been separated from for 30 years. As filming progressed, the filmmakers began to suspect that Salam and all of the black members of the camps were being used as slaves by the traditional Arab inhabitants of the desert, capturing on film testimonies from some of the alleged slaves - testimonies that Salam argues were falsehoods in exchange for financial gain from the filmmakers.
Once the Polisario - the organisation that oversees the Saharan camps and who the filmmakers claim to turn a blind eye to the slavery - discovered the twist that Ayala and Fallshaw's film had taken, the pair were forced to leave the camps, burying their footage in the sands of the desert in the hope of one day retrieving them. Later they were detained and following that they took their allegations to the United Nations.
On the eve of the film's world premiere at the festival, Filmink sat down for a coffee with the brave filmmaking duo and discussed the much debated cardinal rule of filmmakers becoming part of their documentary and not staying behind the camera. Ayala and Falshaw say the turn of events left them with no choice. "The thing is, we were actually drawn into the story," says Fallshaw. "We never intended ourselves to be in front of the camera. That's why mostly in the beginning of the film, you don't see us because we didn't shoot the film like that. We really had no choice because we were detained and kicked out of the camps and having to hide our tapes. To get them back, we became part of the story."
"Half of the characters disappear in the middle of the film [because we were detained] so we had to somehow tell this story, to explain what we went through," adds Ayala. "The covering up of slavery made us understand how deeply rooted this is, how much the slaves didn't want to talk about it [on camera], how badly treated the black people are. We just tried to go further with the film, little by little because we had a big social responsibility then to tell this story."
The filmmakers believe that Salam was coerced by the Polisario - who reportedly paid for her to fly here - to deny their allegations.
No local distribution has been secured for Stolen as yet but Ayala and Fallshaw will tour the film at international film festivals and the documentary is also slated to screen at next month's Melbourne Film Festival.