Filmmakers Ayala and Fallshaw follow Fetim Sellami, a Saharawi refugee, to North Africa for a reunion with her mother. Mother and child were separated when Sellami was a toddler. But the UN-sponsored reunion reveals a secret which spirals the film into a dark world the filmmakers could never have imagined. The black Saharawis start talking about a forbidden subject…Their enslavement.

The filmmakers recount moments of terror when their lives were in danger as well as the extreme hardships in getting the footage across borders. Perhaps most disturbingly, it becomes difficult to distinguish who are the good guys, as the ‘good guys’ turn bad and the ‘bad guys’ appear to do good.

The Polisario, the movement running the camp flew Sellami to the Sydney Film Festival to deny being a slave and that slavery exists in the camps.

Stolen is a compelling, modern-day, real-life cloak-and-dagger thriller.

"What is important about it (Stolen) is that it punctures the complacent and arrogant belief, held by so many, in some standard of objectivity.Of course it’s important for young filmmakers, my students for example, to be rigorous but, above all, they need to be truthful to their experience. The great virtue of STOLEN is that it takes us step by step into a world being discovered by the filmmakers, naive as they are, as they discover it. This is what i want my young filmmakers to try to do and that is why STOLEN is such an valuable model.”

Dick Fontane – head of documentary direction, National Film and Television school (UK).