Mistranslations and Finger-Pointing – Revisiting Stolen
August 2, 2009
Farah
A couple of weeks ago my post on the documentary Stolen generated a whole discussion about whether or not slavery exists in the Tindouf refugee camps in Western Sahara. Is there, isn’t there, it went on and on (even though I distinctly remember saying the post wasn’t discussing whether or there was slavery, but rather about the abuse of Fetim’s story for the uses of others.) But never mind. I decided to reserve my opinion on the existence of slavery in the region until after I watched the film. On Friday I had that opportunity (it was screened as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival) but unfortunately for Fallshaw and Ayala I’m still undecided about the whole issue, and that’s even looking past the fact that it was badly directed.
Fetim (right), with two of her children. Courtesy MIFF.
First, let’s get my major criticism of the film’s structure out of the way. The bulk of the film is shot in the refugee camps, but there are also scenes in Europe, the US and other parts of Africa. One of the biggest problems with the way they’ve structured the movie is that the setting shifts and changes without so much as signposts for the audience. They jump around from France to Geneva to Mauritania to Morocco to New York to Casablanca. Other scenes are thrown in of sitting in airplanes and collecting luggage at airports – but hardly any clarification is given as to where they actually are. Admittedly this isn’t an issue which deters from their central message (of slavery in the refugee camps) but it makes me think the documentary was hastily finished and just really slapped together – and it’s not a great first impression to make.
There are two main problems I have with the film itself. Halfway through the documentary they realise the PLF is out to get them; they bury their tapes in the desert, get detained by the PLF, and after a few hours of negotiation are released on the proviso that they cannot re-enter the camps. The problem is how they get the tapes out of the camps and eventually, out of the region. Assistance is provided by a mysterious Moroccan government official named Mohammed Reda. He tells them the tapes can be smuggled out in a Moroccan diplomatic bag, as long as Ayala and Fallshaw go to an UN-sponsored talk to be held in New York and raise the issue of slavery with the Polisario representative, and also hold a press conference highlighting slavery in the camps. They then proceed to do so. Later the tapes and the directors are reunited in a dingy hotel room – Fallshaw ripping open the plastic bag they were buried in and shaking the sand out of the cases. It’s all very emotional – I was so moved I nearly cried. Tears aside, do the words selling out come to anyone’s mind? In the Q and A session after the film, Fallshaw says doing what Reda wanted was the only option open to them to get their tapes out of the country. Yes they got the story of ‘slavery’ out, but at what cost? By becoming puppets for Moroccan government?
Later they travel to Geneva to question Ursula Aboubacar (the Deputy Director of the UNHCR Bureau for Middle East & North Africa) regarding slavery in the camps. Aboubacar has since denounced the film and questioned her representation; accusing the directors of manipulating what was supposedly a 1hr long interview into a 2 minute sound bite (a transcript of the part of the interview shown in the documentary can be accessed here). Aboubacar says in her email to the directors:
“While you continued to focus on slavery practices in the camps only, I explained that slavery is an issue to be seen in a regional, traditional and cultural practice which will take a long time to completely eradicate. This was the only moment I mentioned the camps as, per se, they are part of the sub-region. Again you manipulated these statements in the most abusive way and took them out of their context for your own purposes.”
Aboubacar highlights the biggest issue I have of the film – the film focuses solely on the practices within the camps. We are given no context, no dynamics, no nothing – the filmmakers don’t tell us the history of the Sahrawi people or from whence they came or anything at all. While it is a complex history and would be difficult to condense, the documentary isn’t overly long – at 1hr 20mins surely they could’ve provided some context – something at least better than what was shown. David Dorward (former head of African Studies at La Trobe University) states, the film “doesn’t adequately deal with ingrained cultural complexities… Legally, the descendants of slaves have [equal rights], but in reality they are second class citizens right across Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania… What they are talking about is racial prejudice. The film takes the notion of slavery and imposes a Western view of a much more complex caste system.”
Like my sister said afterward, the whole film was an exercise in selective finger pointing.
F
Sahar
Farah
August 2, 2009 at 3:00 pm
I found the film fascinating, I study politics and found STOLEN extremely relevant to the times we are living.
It was a very intelligent film, complex and very subtle at the same time. What a fascinating piece of work, glues you to the screen from beginning to end. Quite glad that didn’t go into the boring history of the Polisario vs Morocco conflict but rather into what is happening now.
The comments of the UN woman don’t surprise me at all, she is just another bureaucrat that works for a ineffective organisation.
What incredible courage the filmmakers have….This documentary touched me profoundly on so many levels.
August 3, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Adam,
Were we even watching the same movie??
Firstly, kudos to you for studying politics. Unfortunately some of us are not so well versed in the history of the Western Sahara region. Even a brief explanation to the background of the conflict would have helped the penny drop a little sooner (which it did about halfway through the movie).
Both the filmakers came across as bullies when confronting the Moroccan and Polisario representatives in New York, and Aboubacar from the UN. Particularly grating was Fallshaw’s question during the interview with Aboubacer, “so, what are you going to do about it?…(use) UN police officers?”. Even those without a politics major wouldn’t bother asking a question like that. What did Fallshaw expect her to respond with? Yes, we’ll send in our private army and while we are at it why don’t we take over the world!
I don’t doubt that a lot of effort was put in while making the film and no doubt the Fallshaw and Ayala found themselves in some very tricky situations. However, the entire experience left me a little underwhelmed. After the screening Fallshaw insisted (and this was stated during the movie as well) that they never intended to make a movie about slavery. To be honest, they didn’t really make a movie about much at all. The subject matter kept shifting from Fetim to slaverly to Deido to Casablanca to Morocco to Paris to a Moroccan agent to Embarka’s backstory to her neighbours then to Mauritania then slaughtering a camel…you get my point. A full and succinct picture of what is happening in the region requires more than furtive meetings in the desert, majestic shots of sand dunes and a few choice soundbites. Otherwise we are left with the current situation – the film makers being accused of not covering the story properly. Also casting doubt as to the objectiveness of the film was the extent of Moroccan involvement. Ayala and Fallshaw clearly relied on the Moroccans to get the tapes out of the country (not sure which country, I didn’t even realise they were in Paris at one point) yet addressing the concept of slavery in Morocco lasted all of 10 seconds. Ayala and Fallshaw seemed much more content pointing fingers at who they felt should be held responsible without actually discussing anything in depth.
The narrative was sloppy and haphazard. The interviews with officials were poorly conducted. Too much of the film relied on the voice overs of Ayala and Fallshaw who, by the end of the movie, lacked credibility (case in point – during the interview with Mohammed Reda he asks them to turn off the camera, yet they clearly ignored his request to speak off the record. If he was about to expose his government in a scandal that could have threatened his life, would they have screened that too? It turns out that one of the requirements to meet Reda was that the entire interview be filmed – however this was not told to us during the film but by Fallshaw after the movie when prompted during the Q&A. Such blatant non-compliance with a request to speak off the record surely requires some sort of explanation).
The story of Fetim and her separation from her mother and sister due to the conflict was indeed powerful. But the movie required much more analysis and depth than what was provided.
August 3, 2009 at 7:45 am
MIFF: ‘Stolen’ screening peaceful but passionate
by: David Tiley
Screen Hub
Monday 3 August, 2009
‘Stolen’, the now famous documentary about Polisario, slavery, and the extraordinary campaign to repress the film, ran to a packed and organised house at MIFF on Friday night.
The screening itself passed off quietly, to a fascinated audience. The q&a was moderated by Andrew Dodd, and recorded for Radio National, who asked questioners to identify themselves, and their affiliations with Polisario or the filmmakers.
That didn’t work for long. A variety of people attempted to cast doubt on the plausibility of the story, with a series of mannered micro-speeches; the film’s attackers in Melbourne were clearly disciplined, well-rehearsed and courteous. At least one person supporting the film seemed to share the same passion for planning.
Producer Zubrycki, never relaxed in public, was clearly tense. Fallshaw and Ayala were defensive and hectoring, reflecting their behavior in the second half of the film.
Afterwards, the cinema was abuzz with excited discussion. As I said to one viewer, “I haven’t seen something like this for a long time. It feels like the Seventies.”
“No”, she replied. “The Seventies were much worse.”
The extraordinary thing about this film remains its honesty, which has clearly evolved to anticipate and respond to criticism – an evolution which is only possible with easy digital recuts.
Audience members I talked to generally disliked Fallshaw and Ayala, who admit they dealt with the Moroccans, who seem self important and grandiose, who bully interviewees late in the film.
But it remains convincing – there is slavery in the camps, it takes a certain cultural form, it is named as such, and the film provides a fascinating picture of the experience of enslavement in action.
It is also obsessed with its own story, which shifts from slavery to Polisario’s attempts to deal with a public relations problem. It doesn’t enter the politics of the struggle – we don’t even get a map for around an hour, even though the film is crossing borders. While it defines slavery as present across the region, it never provides a wider context.
The most cursory Google search will reveal that slavery, or human trafficking, or the misuse of people without papers, is endemic across the world. It is not solved by reciting Article Four of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which was pushed through the UN by Doc Evatt, and the Australian Foreign Minister in an ALP government – while Aborigines were hyeld on missions in Western Australia and Queensland as effective slaves.
Carlos Gonzalez, the cameraperson who went with the filmmakers on their second visit to the camps, has written to Screen Hub to amend the record. At the Sydney screening, the film contained a powerful scene in which Fetim… called the filmmakers liars, which he recorded in response to a film he believes is wrong and deceitful.
As I described the situation, “he has denied permission for the scene to remain in the film”.
Gonzalez replied with this: “Dear Mr. Tiley,
Just wanted to clarify something you wrote in the article about Stolen. I never denied permission for my footage to be used in the film, I was simply never asked for my consent and they used it in breach of my copyright. I heard about my footage being used in the film when a reporter called me for comment after the screening at the Sydney Film Festival, hours after that I received an email from Tom Zubrycki apologizing for having used my footage without permission and that they would remove it from the film.”
Kamal Fadel has also written to me, to say that we do not report his point of view. He has had plenty of mainstream coverage, to which we have linked. It is not the function of the media to report ding-dong accusations just because they are made.
Polisario is clearly attacking details of a film which most of our readers have not seen, in order to question the whole, attacking the motivations of filmmakers, and painting itself as staggeringly benign.
It is possible to smell a number of rats in this situation, but the biggest rodent is being dragged around by Polisario. And the inadequacies of the filmmakers are clearly visible in the film.
Fadel links to this article, which is an opinion piece by him on the ABC website. He claims once again that the subtitles are wrong, and goes on to bring Screen Australia into this story.
He says: “Given the myriad of problems with this film, we believe its back story requires a serious investigation.
We have requested the federal Arts Minister Peter Garrett facilitate this.
Until informed conclusions are reached, the government should remove its imprint from the film.
We feel this can be done appropriately. We are not seeking to censor this film, or prevent any interested or curious person from seeing it as it is. We are simply raising our concerns that its fundamental content is false, that taxpayers funded it, and that it wears the Australian Government’s imprimatur.”
In other words, he is claiming that Screen Australia should be questioned on the content of a film it has supported.
At the Melbourne screening, Fadel pointed out that the credits now contain a line which states that Screen Australia and the government do not endorse the content of the program. He claimed that the agency was dissasociating itself from the program.
He repeated this claim in the email, saying that “One thing Tom did not tell which was added to the film Stolen since its screening in Sydney is that Screen Australian has insisted on that a disclaimer be added at the end of the film which stated that the content of the film does not reflect the views of Screen Australian and the Australian Government.
Given the pressure that Polisario and its friends in Australia, particularly inside the ALP, have brought to bear on this matter, the statement is unsurprising.
But it does not represent either a shift in policy or a rejection – Screen Australia would never claim that a production it funded reflected any official point of view.
August 4, 2009 at 3:37 pm
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/archive/audioonly/mme_31072009_e1.mp3
August 5, 2009 at 10:45 am
Hello nuseiba
You have been chosen as one of the active bloggers in maldives.
http://www.mauloofahmed.com/2009/08/most-active-bloggers-in-maldivian.html
August 6, 2009 at 6:55 am
For everyone interested in Stolen!!!
Turn on ABC Radio National at 8.30 am for Julia Rigg’s review of the famous/infamous film.
August 7, 2009 at 8:02 am
[...] Nuseiba revisits the Stolen documentary. [...]
August 10, 2009 at 8:18 am
Stolen Critique: http://awsa.org.au/?p=510
‘Stolen’ critique identifies questionable methods, unethical practices
A detailed report and critique of this new documentary has been prepared investigating the questionable methods and unethical practices from pre to post production used in the making of Stolen, directed by Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw and produced by Tom Zubrycki.
This critique was produced with the voluntary labour of Australians with an interest in and knowledge of Western Sahara. No Polisario or Morrocan money was used in its production. Published by the Australian Western Sahara Association.
Report Production Committee: Yvette Andrews, Cate Lewis, Lyn Allison,
Meredith Burgmann, Ron Guy, Georgia Vlassopoulos, Annette O’Neill
Read or download the report >>
August 11, 2009 at 4:40 am
Who is going to read 45 pages of garbage? I’ve seen the film and have no doubts that slavery is a problem in the North African camps.
I went to Mali few years ago so I’m aware of what is going on there. Slavery and people from the Sahara desert unfortunately go hand in hand.
My take on the filmmakers is that they are brave and honourable people. On the other hand the detractors are uninformed and ignorant. The world of the Saharans is intrinsically complicated and hidden but more of a reason to support the plea of the black people.
August 11, 2009 at 9:02 am
Alex sounds to me like one of the filmmakers.
They keep writing on every blog that the film is good but they don’t explain how. They also avoid to address all the arguments against the film.
They know they’ve made a big mistake.
The film is doomed to fail.
August 19, 2009 at 12:20 am
The badly directed film Stolen, is the only Australian documentary selected for the TORONTO Film Festival.
Stolen is one of the 20 docos in the RTR line up:
Real to Reel presents the very best in non-fiction cinema from around the globe that will challenge, inspire, inform, entertain and move audiences.
http://www.indiewire.com/article/toronto_adds_new_docs_introduces_one_day_doc_conference/
August 21, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Stolen, the documentary which has so annoyed Polisario, now has an international premiere, at the Toronto International Film Festival, as one of the twenty documentaries on its program. Polisario has many supporters in North America, and it will be interesting to see if they are as exercised by the story as the Australian office.
August 27, 2009 at 1:08 am
Watch the Stolen trailer at:
August 27, 2009 at 12:53 pm
http://www.spectator.co.uk/australia/5289343/diary.thtml
Philippe Mora
Wednesday, 26th August 2009
Philippe Mora opens his diary
I was in Sydney’s Chinatown, enjoying delicious steamed lobster with ginger and attending the recent Film Festival, when I got a dramatic phone call. An old friend and cameraman for three of my films, Carlos Gonzalez, was calling from Los Angeles to say that a West Saharan woman, Fetim, from Tindouf refugee camp in Algeria, was flying in to Sydney to denounce a film portraying her as a slave. Carlos was a friend of Fetim, and he asked me would I meet her at the airport. He said the family was very distressed at the allegations and felt betrayed by the Australian film-makers who had lived with them on the pretext they were making a documentary about a family reunion.
Frankly, after decades of battles I have issue fatigue. But I knew Carlos had impeccable credentials on this issue, known as the Forgotten Conflict. He had risked his life in 2006 to go into occupied Western Sahara to film interviews with indigenous children who had been allegedly tortured by the Moroccan occupiers. (Morocco had invaded in 1975.) He was arrested and interrogated for eight hours on 3 June 2006 by Moroccan police and intelligence officers, including the notorious alleged torturer Mohammed El Hassouni, known as ‘Moustache’. He was then promptly deported and denounced in the Moroccan press, to our great amusement, but not to his, as being a spy for Hugo Chavez and Mossad. Since I knew he was neither but a director of children’s shows for Nickelodeon in Hollywood and a generally standup fellow, I agreed to help his incoming ‘slave’ friends.
Fetim and her husband Baba arrived chainless early in the morning and I greeted them with Kamal Fadel, the Australian representative of the Polisario, the political organisation that had flown them out. Charismatic, smart and open, I immediately liked Kamal and his two guests. Slaves with passports! They headed for friends in Glebe, where all slaves hang out when they’re in Sydney.
Then the whole thing blew up. Fetim’s dramatic denunciation of the film Stolen that night at the festival ended up on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. The ABC’s 7.30 Report went after the flaws in the film. Stolen received a barrage of blistering criticism for mistranslations, re-enactments, lack of releases from leading participants, Mondo Cane-type sensationalism, blurring of facts, maps and history. One of the film-makers’ aunts vigorously defended the film on blogs. Meanwhile I had re-connected with old mate, wit, great writer and political connoisseur, Bob Ellis, and as an unlikely Poirot and Sherlock Holmes duo we made some inquiries. An angry UN interviewee cried foul at the film, as did a key translator. Ellis and I exchanged opinions on the film way too rude, if not obscene, for publication in this august magazine. The Morocco-Polisario conflict underlying the debate was not a left-right debate as the film-maker’s aunt tried to make out. In fact, James Baker, no pinko, had tried to help the Polisario with vigour in the Nineties.
Producer Tom Zubrycki announced people were trying to ‘do a job’ on the film. He backed out of an interview with me. We met tyro filmmakers Dan Fallshaw and Violeta Ayala in a bar and complained the problem was that people were jealous of them, that Ellis had fought with his wife (sic), that slavery is a state of mind, and other irrelevant inanities. Ellis, like a cultural Grim Reaper, said to Fallshaw, who blanched: ‘You are going to jail, son.’
The story continued last week when a revamped version, with piquant deletions, was shown at the Melbourne International Film Festival with a disclaimer belatedly added by co-financier Screen Australia. Questions about whether Polisario-haters in Morocco contributed funding to the film remain unanswered.
Other serious queries remain about this film, and as a sometime documentary film-maker I maintain that fakery and fraud, if that is what this is, hurts us all as film-makers, journalists and film-goers. It’s my opinion, for example, that it is either dishonesty, negligence or incompetence not to get releases from people one is portraying in a film making such grave allegations. I am no saint, but certain standards should be de rigueur. Perhaps there was acute First World arrogance in this situation. A few Australians pontificating about alleged slavery and really hurting people in the guise of helping them is a bit rich. An Italian NGO in the camp described Ayala as a ‘mythomaniac’.
By contrast, a recent positive highlight was vicariously going into orbit and repairing the Hubble telescope. My wife Pamela and I met six of the astronauts who fixed it in May at a special event at the Academy in Beverly Hills. The astronaut film-makers took up 30 cameras including an IMAX 3D camera that could only film for eight minutes. At a mission cost of US$1.1 billion to fix the Hubble, the eight-minute film element must be the most expensive movie ever made. The bemused astronauts, dressed in Jetsons-style retro blue overalls, mingled with us Hollywood types over drinks and snacks. We watched extraordinary footage of the mission with the jubilation of being in space popping out of the screen.
I am working on a 3D film about the life of Salvador Dali with producer Fred Bestall of Delux Films in Luxembourg, so I am immersed in notions of surrealism. I don’t think one needs to contrive surrealism because arguably life itself is often surreal. A Daliesque thought: perhaps molecules from the hands of refugees on my hand rubbed off on the Hubble mission astronaut’s hand? The Hubble is searching for the origin of the universe, the refugees search for justice and food for their children. Do these connections mean anything or are they random events? Is all this surreal? Dali himself said: ‘I don’t do drugs. I am drugs!’
August 31, 2009 at 3:18 am
Bob Ellis has got his info wrong. Fallshaw is going to Toronto!!!
http://www.tiff.net/filmsandschedules/films/stolen
August 31, 2009 at 9:24 am
Well, Fallshaw may still go to prison when he comes back.
September 7, 2009 at 1:20 am
See it to believe it :
Interview with Ursula Aboubacar, the UN officer that claimed that never any case of slavery has been brought to the attention of UNHCR.
Violeta: You are there since 1991 and until now you have done nothing with regards to this?
Ursula: No that is not correct, there have been prosecutions because of this, there has been police officers tracing people who had slaves and this is what I have received as reports…
No body is denying the existence because again this human rights abuse is specific to this culture…
If we just bring it from the outside, the reaction would be immediately defense, the Polisario would say ‘no, it doesn’t exist’
See it your self:
October 4, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Stolen (Recommended)
Documenting a story about a reunion, after 30 years, between a mother and daughter in a Polisario refugee camp in the Western Sahara, Australian-based filmmakers Violeta Ayala and Daniel Fallshaw stumble on another — more profoundly unsettling and deeply concealed — about systemic slavery in Western Africa, a practice denied by governments and refugee caretakers alike, as well as by many of its victims. The film moves into political thriller territory when the filmmakers are made suddenly aware that the conversations they have taped put the lives of their subjects in peril, and they themselves have become prey to sinister political and cultural forces. Riveting stuff. Tonight 7 p.m., AMC, 10 Dundas St. E. Greg Quill (Toronto Star)