Title: Between Us and The World
Foreign Title:
Year: 2026
Countries: United Kingdom
Language: No Dialogue
Director: Wallace Minchong Li
Click here to see the cast and crew
If you are not going to research who the Sahrawi people are, what the dispute over Western Sahara is, and what the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic is about, you might find this short film boring, uninteresting, or simply not very good.
Three title cards accompany the film. The opening one sets the premise: some colonial footage of the vast territory and the people who inhabit it, the second most sparsely populated territory in the world after Greenland. It consists of 3½ minutes of old images from the 1950s.
It is followed by a second title explaining the film’s premise: local youth walk through and explore locations that might have appeared in the original footage. The images shift from the abstract to the staged, from close-ups of youngsters walking to the vast, starry sky. Some are clear; others are visually manipulated, double- and triple-layered. Voices and conversations accompany the images.
It all comes together at the end, with a final title thanking the youngsters for sharing their stories, hopes, dreams, and thoughts. Only at that moment did I understand the gentle approach of the filmmaker and the somewhat universal message of the film: common dreams, whether in the center of the world or in one of the most troubled places in Africa.
Between Us and the World might not be a “good” film, but it is an honest, sensitive, and profound work.
