Desert Blues (WT)

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Logline

Having fled a Mali where music was banned, musicians from across the Sahel meet in the M'berra refugee camp in Mauritania and play a sound that never existed before. The film follows Ousmane, Mariam and Abdallah from a self-built studio to the Festival au Désert, where this sound leaves the camp for the first time.

Synopsis

Endless sand, sun and hopes left behind. In the middle of the Sahara lies M'berra, one of the largest refugee camps in the world. What began as a temporary shelter has long become a permanent settlement, and despite difficult conditions a lively music scene has grown here.

Ousmane fled the war in Mali with his family when he was four. He made his first music on a phone app before he got a simple guitar. We follow his band from rehearsals in the sandy streets of the camp to their first stages outside M'berra. Mariam, 17, plays the imzad, a Tuareg fiddle traditionally played by women. She dreams of electric guitar, singing and a band of her own, in a scene still shaped mostly by men. Abdallah is rebuilding the Festival au Désert in the Mauritanian desert. The festival was once Mali's international meeting point for Saharan music, until the conflict forced it into exile.

The camp, the music and the festival come together in one movement and one sound: the sound of a fleeing city. The film is made with its protagonists, not about them, and was developed during long research stays in M'berra.

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