El sueño de las lagartijas

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.

Fatimetu returns to the Wilaya of Smara for the funeral of her mother, after 16 years living in Spain. There she meets her brother Jatri, who is expecting his first child with Aichetu his wife, and her sister Hayat. Jatri tells her that she has inherited the family Khaimah and must care for her sister. Fatimetu reluctantly accepts the last will of her mother, though she is not sure how to take care of her sister as she can barely take care of herself.

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.