Directing
Morocco doesn’t want you to know what’s happening in the occupied territories of the Western Sahara. The Saharawi people live under constant threat. They can’t mention either the Western Sahara or “referendum”. The situation is known as “The Problem”. Foreign journalists who attempt to take pictures or shoot with a video camera in the Western Sahara are immediately expelled from this former Spanish colony. For Saharawis it means harsh repression from the Moroccan police, who intend to silence the Saharawi population. Welcome to the last colony in Africa. We visited this place. We spent four years compiling material and gathering testimonies from journalists and other professionals who know what’s really happening in the Western Sahara. All of it undocumented until now.
In 1955, fascinated by the ingenious pigeon hunting with wooden paddles and nets, Orson Welles directed the documentary The Land of the Basques. Today, from a mountain hut on the border between Navarre and France, Gerardo Damboriena, a veteran pigeon hunter, reveals to us in basque the secrets of this more than 700-year-old tradition, now on the verge of extinction.
