Javier Bardem has never played an investigative reporter in his many dramatic films.
But the Spanish Oscar winner turns into a real-life journalist for Sons of the Clouds: The Last Colony, the refugee-crisis documentary he brought to TIFF 2012. He’s involved because he’s frustrated by a lack of clarity and action by global governments and the United Nations.
Forced to live in refugee camps or on Moroccan-occupied lands for decades, the Sahrawi remain peaceful due to their highly honourable culture, says Bardem.
Together with director Alvaro Longoria, Bardem uses his celebrity spotlight to probe deeply into the epic tragedy and scandal that has hundreds of thousands of people in the Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, living as the impoverished hostages of failed politics.
These people, known as Sahrawi, have for decades been forced to live in refugee camps or on Moroccan-occupied lands, because the world doesn’t know how to deal with Morocco’s illegal territorial ambitions.
Neighbouring Morocco seized control of the Western Sahara in 1975 after Spain quit the territory, but it hasn’t abided by a United Nations order in 2000 that a referendum be held to allow Sahrawi self-determination and possible independence from Morocco.
The UN has done nothing to enforce its ruling. Meanwhile, governments in Spain, France and the U.S. have been foot-dragging, reluctant to rock the boat with their allies in Morocco. In the film, Bardem and Longoria are seen trying to pry answers and commitments out of politicians, including Moroccan ones, getting mostly evasive answers or no answers at all.
“We were very affected by how much rejection we had from people who should be there talking about it and giving their opinion,” Bardem said.
Q: How many Sahrawi are there?
Longoria: They're split between the occupied territories, which they consider to be 150,000, and the refugee camps, which is around 200,000. But there's no official figure about how many Sahrawis there are.
Q: Why is so little known about the plight of the Sahrawi?
Bardem: It's little known because they basically are peaceful. In Spain it's well known because we have this historical responsibility with them, a moral responsibility with them, but out of Spain it's not well known beyond the political forums.
It’s a good example of a solution that should be an easy solution, that could be fixed. Not easily, because nothing is easy. But it is not that complicated because they have the law and the truth on their side. And it doesn't get fixed because of economic interest and geostrategy interests and the backup of the United States and France and Spain also.
Q: You say in the film that Spaniards would react much more strongly than the Sahrawi do, if they were in the same situation. Why have the Sahrawi accepted their plight so peacefully?
B: I don’t know, but they have that in their own nature. It's something when you go to the refugee camps and talk to them and see how they react. They are like that. I don't know the reason.
L: Well, maybe it's a position where the culture is a very honourable culture, no? They believe the right thing will happen and they're trying to prove it can be like that. If they go back to war, they're very few. It would be a disaster. They would be destroyed.
B: The thing is new generations are rising, as we say in the movie. People have been born in refugee camps and they are getting tired of that. It will be a bloodbath if that happens.
Q. There’s a hopeful note at the end of the film that the U.S. and the UN are going to try to use sanctions against Morocco to try to get some action. Are you hopeful that the tide is turning?
B: Well, I think it’s come to a point, this very moment, where things should be taken seriously by people who can really make a difference about it … Because otherwise, it will be one of the tales that happen every day in the news, where people are killed and bombed and destroyed (by terrorism).