The FiSahara International Film Festival, the event held in a refugee camp in the Algerian desert, and its Audiovisual School have been recognized with the González Sinde 2022 Award from the Spanish Film Academy “for their extensive and hard-working career making visible, training and entertaining the Sahrawi population through its annual film, culture and human rights festival, and its dedication to the education of Sahrawi youth with its Abidin Kaid Saleh audiovisual training school“.
This award, intended to honor the work of those people or institutions that, using the cinematographic medium, use it to achieve social ends, has been awarded, in its 19th edition, to the event directed by Tiba Chagaf: “Receiving the González Sinde Award means a lot because it recognizes those of us who are committed to implanting the audiovisual tool in a culture that was completely oral”, highlights the director of the Abidin Kaid Saleh Audiovisual Training School, which created FiSahara in 2011 to train young Saharawis in film and television and preserve and disseminate their cultural heritage.
“This award is a recognition for all the people who in the Saharawi refugee population camps and here have been making FiSahara possible for almost 20 years, embracing cinema for a just cause”, underlines María Carrión, executive director of this non-competitive event, which for six days becomes a movie theater with screenings, meetings, round tables and a short film competition, showing its culture and receiving that of other countries.
FiSahara, an initiative between the Sahrawi Ministry of Culture, the NGO NomadsHRC and other international organizations, is one of the most anticipated events of the year by the inhabitants of the camps, who will reopen their shops next Tuesday and until October 16. tents to the actors, directors and journalists who visit the camp, and at nightfall they will enjoy the more than twenty films that will be projected on a large outdoor screen and from which the winning story will come out, chosen by a popular jury , who will receive a white camel, a symbol of peace for the Saharawi people.
GONZALEZ SINDE AWARD
This annual award that the Spanish Film Academy created in 1998 takes its name from the first president of the institution, José María González Sinde. It has been received by the Fundación de Ayuda contra la Drogradicción, Fundación Casa del Actor, Colectivo Drac Mágic, Cinema Rescat, Museo del Cinema-Col.llecció Tomás Mallol, Librería 8 y Medio, Josep Maixenchs, Instituto Valenciano de Cinematografía Ricardo Muñoz Suay, Festival de Nantes, Festival Solidario de Cine Español de Cáceres, Filmoteca del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Casa de la India, Audiovisual nas Aulas, Festival de Cine Español de Toulousse, Enrique Iznaola, 16 kilómetros- Festival Internacional de Cine de Cañada Real, Paco Arango and Fundación Aladina, Festival de Cine Africano de Tarifa Tánger and Peris Costumes and #AAA (ActúaAyudaAlimenta) platform.
