Review – ‘Stolen’: Seeing More Possibilities
By Cynthia Fuchs 5 April 2011
PopMatters Film and TV Editor
You canât change these ideas until you get out and see other possibilities.
âTizlam
âIs it true my white grandmother beat you as a child?â asks 15-year-old Leil, Her mother, Fetim, looks at her hard, still chewing her lunch. They sit at a table, a TV behind them, as well as a doorway, open onto a bright white daylight. Leil continues, âVioleta already knows,â as the camera cuts to filmmaker Violeta Ayala, seated across from them. Her face turns cloudy as she listens: âYouâll be in trouble, by saying that we were beaten,â cautions Fetim. Again, the camera shows her instructing her daughter, âItâs always been that slaves are beaten from a young age.â
The scene breaks here, as Leil gets up to welcome a younger sibling inside, through that bright-lit doorway. And the film, Stolen, has changed. Before this moment, as Ayala has narrated, the documentary was observing preparations for a family reunion. Fetim had come to a refugee camp in the Algerian desert as a child some 30 years ago, leaving behind her Moroccan mother Embarka and her siblings. At first, Ayala says, she and Dan Fallshaw meant to film Spanish-speaking refugees in the Western Sahara, and felt lucky to have access to a family about to reunite, thanks to a program initiated in 2004 by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees that brings Moroccan family members to the camp for five-day visits. With some 27,000 on the waiting list, the fact that Fetim and Embarka have been selected seems miraculous.
And yet: this story is now reframed, as Ayala and Fallshaw learn that their subjects are not only refugees, but also slaves. The filmmakers canât begin to guess at the complications that follow from this discovery.
Stolenâscreening 5 April at Stranger Than Fiction, a co-presentation with the African Film Festival, and followed by a Q&A with Ayala and Fallshawâcharts their efforts to understand what they find. Their questions elicit astonishing and also cryptic stories, as Fetim and Leil, as well as Fetimâs cousin Matala, sort through what is safe to tell âthe foreigners.â The storytelling process, as it unfolds on camera, is at once fascinating and alarming, as it becomes clear that saying âtoo muchâ is more costly for Fetim than her Australian visitors anticipate.
At the same time, the filmmakersâ parts in the process are also complex, as they are increasingly responsible for what theyâre filmingâwhether by paying for part of the celebration for Embarkaâs visit or by documenting stories told by Fetim and her family, descriptions of the system of slavery still in place in the camps and elsewhere. As the film reports, the Polisario Liberation Front, a nationalist organization backed by Algeria, have been fighting with Morocco over the Western Sahara for the last 34 years. Neither the Moroccan government nor the Polisario wants such stories documented. And yet, with at least 2 million black people living in slavery in North Africa, Stolen insists, telling such stories is only a first step.
Indeed, Fetimâs initial revelation that she has a âwhite mother,â Deido, surprises Ayala, who wonders how they ended âup together, with so much racism in the past?â Deido explains, sort of. âSaharan people are not all the same,â she says, her interview shot as she sits before a striking red tent wall. âSome of them buy black people and own them, others free them, but keep them as their family. We donât talk about this anymore.â

Still, Ayala and Fallshaw find that some black Africans do talk about this, but only when they are alone together, and for a brief time, in front of the âforeigners.â The film pieces together bits of conversations, a fragmented structure that results from the filmmaking process per se, as the Polisario and then the Moroccans try to confiscate and at last steal their tapes. The effect of the fragments is to the point, however, as the stories are shared and whispered, then covered over or repressed, as experiences are acknowledged and then denied, as autonomy is namedâin the form of âliberation,â as Deido says she has granted to Fetimâand then rescinded, when papers are withheld and daily life continues as such.
As Ayala and Fallshaw tell itâtheir own voiceovers working in tandem, finishing each otherâs sentencesâtheyâre struck by Fetimâs submission to Deido, her performance of chores and her lack of independence. Further, though no one will âspeak about this,â they also discover that Embarka belonged to Deidoâs father, and that she bore him several children. âDeidoâs father fucked her,â says Fetimâs friend Jueda after Fetim becomes so unnerved by the conversation that she leaves the room. âThatâs how the white girl Fatma was born,â Fatma being Fetimâs sister, still living with Embarka in Morocco.
A friend of Leil, Tizlam, is also outspoken concerning what it means to be a slave. âYouâre just scratching the surface,â she says, her face at once poised and fierce in dim shadows. âThey come and take the children and the parents canât say anything, they have no rights.â Her grandmother concurs, and they seem willing to speak, though they donât seem to expect a change. âThere is no law for us,â Tizlam says, âWhat we want is for this not to exist. It should be erased, it should be from the past, not the present or the future.â Ayala and Fallshaw describe their growing concern, not only for their own safety but also for âall the people who trusted us with their stories.â
Their worries are well founded, as they are detained by the Polisario. The filmmakers bury their tapes in the desertâan apt and awful metaphor for the experiences theyâve heard aboutâand then escape to Paris, where they pursue the story, hoping to recover their material and make public what theyâve witnessed. A phone call with Leil reveals, however, that their own ambitions and hopes donât matter much: Leil cries, âTrying to do good, you did bad. Now the police are all over us.â As Ayala ponders this notion in voiceover, that âwithout intending to, we got Leila and Fetim in a lot of trouble,â the film structure makes clear the problem: sheâs in a hotel room, at a distance. None of us can know what Leil and Fetim are experiencingâoff camera.
The film traces how Ayala and Fallshaw come to know the ongoing complexities of slavery. As it is denied by most North African regimes (in Mauritania, Mali, and Senegal, as well as Algeria and Morocco) and described here by Ursula Aboubacar, the Deputy Director of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, as âa cultural issue that is existing.â That is, as Aboubacar puts it, the UN can only âcombatâ the practice by bringing it to the attention of local police forces, the Polisario included. Ayala is horrified by the lack of power wielded by the UN, or anyone else, it seems. Indeed, as Tizlam has said, âThere is no law for us.â
The documentary makes this case forcefully. In addition to assembling interviews that officials and others have tried to keep quiet, it includes footage of a screening and audience responses in Sydney. The ethical questions here impossibly tangled: even after Fetim, Leil, and Deido withdraw their consent to appear in the film, Alaya and Fallshaw include not only their interviews, but also footage of Fetim at the filmâs premiere (the Polisario, a note explains, âflew Fetim to Sydney to protest at the filmâs premiere,â along with her husband). Her objections have led to other repressions, as the Swedish public broadcaster SVT-UR has pulled the movie from its schedule. While the truth remains elusive off-camera, Stolen insists that still more needs to be exposed, that documentation is indeed only a first step.
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Cynthia Fuchs is director of Film & Media Studies and Associate Professor of English, Film & Video Studies, African and African American Studies, Sport & American Culture, at George Mason University.