Wilaya

Determined not to simply get married, start a family, and grow old like the rest of the girls in her town, an aspiring Cuban diva sets out to launch a career as a singer.

A young Cuban named Olga arrives in Spain with a scholarship convinced that she has landed the chance of a lifetime. Deciding to stay, she eventually becomes an illegal immigrant, suffering the brunt of marginalization and, unable to return home, having to get by as she can. Mari Jo is a young girl from a poor Valencian suburb, born into a family with nothing but problems. Fate has marked her life as she too becomes an outcast. Both end up working illegally in a furniture factory where they earn three times less than the minimum legal salary.

A woman who is 27 weeks pregnant is the victim of an attack and since then she has remained in a coma, hovering between life and death. In such a situation of unconsciousness, bad memories and episodes of violence stir in her mind.

Western Sahara is a country full of stories. We chose to focus on the Sahrawi women living in Spain, where they have taken up careers in different areas: doctors, nurses, teachers, artists, lawyers, writers. We coexist with them. Some are Muslim, others have strayed away from their original culture, although they remain persistent on defending the most ancestral parts of their traditions. It is a gaze through the exiled Sahrawi woman’s eyes.