Australia and USA / 2009 / 78mins / Documentary / Spanish, Hassania, and English

Ayala and Fallshaw thought they were making a feel-good documentary about family reunions in Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony in North Africa, much disputed by its neighbors. But the filmmakers stumbled on something altogether more politically pungent and found themselves at the center of a huge international controversy, involving modern day slavery.

Violeta Ayala

Violeta Ayala is an artist, writer, actress and film director born in Bolivia. She studied Theatre and Journalism at Charles Sturt University in Australia, where her curiosity in filmmaking began and she made Proyecto Vila Vila, a short film about the effects of cervical cancer on indigenous women in Bolivia, shown at the Sydney Latin Film Festival and the Al Jazeera Film Festival in Doha. In 2006 Violeta began her collaboration with Dan Fallshaw in North Africa on Between the Oil and the Deep Blue Sea, an investigative documentary about corruption in the oil industry, and Violeta wrote Slick Operator, an article on the same subject published on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. In 2009 her first feature documentary Stolen premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and won many awards. Violeta is a Tribeca Film Institute Fellow and an alumnus of the Film Independent Documentary Lab. Violeta has participated on panels and discussion ranging from IDFA, Toronto, Art Exit, Stranger than Fiction in New York and many others. Her other film credits include The Bolivian Case (2015), which premiered as a Special Presentation at Hot Docs, and was nominated for Premios Platino and Fenix (the two most prestigious awards in Ibero-America); Cocaine Prison which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017; and The Fight (2017) winner of the Doc Dispatch Award at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival and Best Short at the International Human Rights Festival in Sucre, Bolivia. Learn More

Dan Fallshaw

Dan was born in Sydney, Australia. His family moved to London when he was six, disappointed he vowed to live in a non-English speaking country when he was old enough. He comes from a heritage of photographers, but pursuing a career as a veterinarian Dan studied Science at Sydney University. His seminal artistic work titled The Day My Left Hand Taught My Right Hand to Draw. Dan returned to university to study Visual Communications at the University of Technology in Sydney and St Martins College in London. Dan is an award-winning filmmaker and one of the producers/directors of the controversial Stolen, which he also shot and edited.Dan won Best Editor at the 2010 Documentary Edge Festival for Stolen. He made Between the Oil and the Blue Sea with Violeta Ayala in 2006. Dan is a Tribeca Film Institute Fellow and an alumnus of the Film Independent Documentary Lab. Learn More